BOOK REVIEW
WAITING
“I believe that’s the humanity I was trying to preserve back then; all the laughs, the luck, and the laments with images that tell their story,” writes photographer Richard Kelley in the introduction to his book waiting. “It was an immense privilege to have had that chance.”
From 1972 through to 1984, in what he dubs as ‘The Golden Age’ of Formula 1, Kelley attended the United States Grand Prix each year. While there, he set about capturing the more emotional side of F1 – showing the drivers’ “stories”, as he puts it, through his cinematic use of black and white photography. This book is the culmination of that work and contains more than 300 photos.
Kelley demonstrates he was not aiming to capture photos which would be used as “weekend sports headlines”, but instead he looked to shoot something more visceral, and more human with his work.
The book is ordered chronologically, with breaks in between the various years to share the more personal stories of several of the key drivers during that era, such as James Hunt and Niki Lauda. At the beginning of each chapter Kelley takes time to contextualise what was happening during that period, focusing on the everchanging landscape of grand prix racing. He goes on to reflect more personally on the time, often with a mournful tone about many of the drivers who lost their lives, as well as the direction F1 was taking because of rule changes.
Many, but not all the photos, are portraits of drivers and key personnel often in conversation, or preparing themselves, or the cars for the session ahead. While this might be considered mundane compared to the actual racing, it’s the nature of the drivers themselves and their dangerous profession which elevates these images, and which Kelley has attempted to capture. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the chapter devoted to Francois Cevert.
The photos of Cervert are, on the surface, rather ordinary shots of him in a car preparing for qualifying ahead of the 1973 United States Grand Prix. But what makes these photos extraordinary is the circumstances that followed. Shortly after Kelley captured the shots of Cervert, he died in a fatal accident at the Esses at Watkins Glen. The ephemeral nature of Kelley’s photographs result in truly unique imagery which, taken in conjunction with the stories provided in the book, give a unique outlook into F1 at this time.
To accompany the images, Kelley uses captions with anecdotes and stories about his time in the paddock. If there is a criticism to be made of the book, it’s that at times these captions feel repetitive. Often the chapters devoted to certain drivers will go over similar facts and tales as already mentioned in previous pages.
But this book is not a conventional narrative history of F1 in the 1970s and ’80s per se. Rather, and as captured in the quote at the beginning in Kelley’s introduction, this book is more about letting the photography shine through and reveal the stories of this age. Therefore, the overlapping captions can be forgiven. They are not there to tell the stories of the drivers, they are there purely to provide some context to the photos. It is the images that provide the true narrative.
Waiting is a personal and reflective journey through one of the critical eras in F1 as told in the medium of photography during a time when drivers were a “band of brothers” living, racing and dying alongside each other in the pursuit of glory.