LIFE THROUGH A LENS: GUS GREGORY

He began shooting cars almost by accident, but went on to take photographs that helped set the visual template for evo. Here Gus Gregory tells the story of his career to date and singles out some of his favourite images

Twenty-three years ago he helped define evo’s photographic style. Here Gus Gregory explains how he got there and chooses his all-time favourite shots

‘THE FRAME YOU CAPTURE IN YOUR MIND is the best one. Always pin. Never grainy. Just the right amount of movement. The car caught at the perfect moment.’ So says Gus Gregory, a photographer for whom committing what’s in his mind’s eye to film or pixels has been an all-consuming quest from the moment he first picked up a camera.

Its been a while since Gus has shot cars for magazines (more of which later), but it was he who set the tone – and the bar – for the imagery that helped evo forge its reputation. From finding fresh locations to experimenting with a wide array of cameras or pioneering new ways of shooting, Gus and his trusty Subaru Forester were always to be found in the thick of it.

He came relatively late to shooting cars, but photography captivated him from childhood. ‘My mum bought me a Kodak 126 Instamatic when I was eight or nine,’ explains Gregory. ‘I always had it with me. I was always taking photographs. I always had things in my mind when I took them, but I remember being frustrated that the Instamatic couldn’t recreate what I was seeing.’

Instead of allowing that frustration to sour his passion, Gus continued to take pictures through adolescence into adulthood: ‘I left home at 16 and shared a house with a bunch of mates in Brighton. One of the lads at the house had a Zenit 35mm camera. He lent it to me and explained aperture and shutter speed and the relationship between those two. From that point I was off and away.

‘A lot of my friends were in bands at that time, so I did tons of pictures of them at gigs. I took a few nice shots – the images on the back of The Housemartins’ first album cover are mine – but I tended to fall short, because I was weak technically. Still, I knew photography was my thing.’

Much like motoring journalism there’s no set route to becoming an automotive

photographer. Even so, Gus’s journey is particularly circuitous. A stint at the BBC’S Hulton Picture Library (then one of Europe’s largest commercial photograph collections) saw him setting up a new darkroom facility there in the early to mid 1980s. It was here, with access to literally millions of images, including many iconic 20th-century reportage photographs, that he found true inspiration.

‘It was a pivotal time for me. There was a group of us who were massively into photojournalism. We would shoot at weekends, then come back to work on Monday to process our films while we were processing other stuff. We’d print stuff up and critique one another’s images. We took it very seriously.

‘My grandfather had a garage so I grew up around cars and motorbikes. I’d seen

Car magazine and was blown away buy the photography, but my heroes were Henri Cartierbresson, Josef Koudelka and the other Magnum photographers. Their style and the fact many of them were from working-class backgrounds really resonated with me.’

This spell at the BBC preceded a move to Hong Kong, where Gregory spent five years working as a freelance photographer. ‘Hong Kong was an incredible place to live and work. Everyone was willing to give you a chance. I’d get amazing jobs coming from agencies in the UK – studio shoots, portraits, ad campaigns. I also went on assignments for titles like Condé

Nast Traveller and Tatler. It was a massive learning curve, but it was brilliant for me, as I came back from Hong Kong a much better photographer and absolutely full of confidence.’

It wasn’t until he returned to the UK in the early ’90s that Gus started photographing cars. More by accident, as he freely admits. ‘An old friend happened to be going out with Tim Wren, who was one of the automotive photographers at that time. It turned out Tim had a job the next day and needed an assistant. It was on that job that I bumped into Dom Fraser [the subject of Life Through a Lens in issue 278], who told me a new magazine called Carweek was looking for a photographer. I had nothing but reportage and portraits in my portfolio, but they gave me the job.’

For the 18 months that the weekly offshoot of Car lasted, it provided Gus the perfect opportunity to develop his skills. ‘When I started at Carweek I can remember being very excited about taking moving pictures of cars, and not at all excited about taking static pictures of cars,’ he recalls. ‘Of course, I had to do both, but a moving picture of a car tells so much more of a story. Making cars look as exciting as possible soon became my mission.’

When Carweek came to an end, Gus went

freelance again, quickly becoming a regular shooter for Performance Car and Car amongst others. Then PC closed in the summer of 1998 and evo rose from its ashes in the autumn, and the role Gregory played in helping to create the look of the new magazine cannot be underestimated. ‘When evo started it was us against them. Us against the world. I felt a very great weight of responsibility to make everything that I shot look exceptional. I’ll never forget how special it was to be a part of.’

For Gus, making exceptional images meant constantly trying new things and pushing his kit to the limit. In the pre-digital age that meant attaching all kinds of unlikely, expensive and often unwieldy cameras to perilous parts of chase cars to get the shot.

‘I loved using different formats of film cameras. I went through a phase of using a Fuji 617 landscape camera for tracking shots. It was a ruddy great thing, but it could take stunning images. After that I switched to a Hasselblad. My favourite was the Xpan [a compact, Zeisslensed panoramic camera], but for years prior to that all I’d put on the front or back of a chase car was my medium-format Hasselblad. You’d have to set everything before each run – no auto-focus or auto-exposure. And it would have the cable release taped along the bonnet and in through the window so I could shoot while driving the chase car.’

Whether working for evo or Car, Gregory was in his element shooting road trips: ‘I did find those jobs wonderful things to do. They were proper missions and they liberated me from the constraints of regular stuff. I could shoot things exactly how I wanted them seen. I also liked the fantasy of it. Capturing cars and journeys to roads and places that are just a dream for most people.’

You’ll have noticed much of this interview is written in the past tense. As with camera technology, life moves on. In Gregory’s case to an unplanned but energising switch from working behind the camera to a role in front of one, for the engaging and refreshingly downto-earth TV show Flipping Bangers.

‘I’ve always tried to be open to new things,’ explains Gus. ‘When you’re approaching your mid-50s and a good mate with a great track record in television production approaches you out of the blue to develop and shoot a pilot for a new TV car show, well, you’ve got to run with it, haven’t you? ’

Will we see Gregory shoot new images for the pages of evo? ‘I still think of myself as a photographer,’ he says, offering a glimmer of hope. ‘And I definitely enjoy the power and immediacy of digital. Everything looks better now. It reliably delivers what we were pushing so hard to do 20-odd years ago. Visually it’s brilliant now. Absolutely brilliant.’ C’mon Gus, let’s get the band back together.

Zondas, Gran Sasso, Italy (previous pages) ‘I shot this [for evo 074] on a Hasselblad Xpan. Prefocused, pre-light-metered, camera attached to front of our chase car with one of my custom-made extra-long shutter-release cables fed through the window. This is one of those fantastical moments I felt so much pressure to capture.’ BMW 3.0 CSL, Nürburgring ‘I shot this on a Fuji 617 – a ridiculously massive camera to use for this kind of shot. I mean, you had to focus it with an old-school hood over you. But the superlandscapes it captured blew my mind. The significance of car and place, plus the movement of the leaves, made the image come together in glorious Technicolor.’ Land Rover Discovery & Mercedes taxi, Marrakesh ‘This was a Car magazine drive story to Timbuktu. I was shooting the Discovery coming around the corner with the Marrakesh sign, and the taxi just swerved through the shot. Right place, right time.’ Horsemen in Mongolia ‘In Mongolia, no matter how far you are from humanity, within 20 minutes someone will arrive on a horse to say hello. It’s the most bizarre thing. I was doing a scouting trip for Land Rover ahead of the G4 Challenge, driving from Ulaanbaatar to the border with Kyrgyzstan. It was just the most beautiful scene. I couldn’t not photograph it.’

Ford GT in the Alps ‘The St Gotthard Pass was closed, so Dickie Meaden and I drove back and forth to the barrier, effectively having this amazing stretch to ourselves. I think this was shot from a tripod rig with my Hasselblad Superwide, which meant one frame per run. It was a laborious process, but the shot was worth it.’ VW Touareg, Morocco ‘A Car magazine job, taking a VW Touareg to find a Touareg tribe. Being nomadic they’re pretty hard to find, but we found this guy in the Black Desert in Morocco. He’d never driven a car before in his life, so we let him have a go. He nearly hit something, which is pretty good going in the middle of a desert.’ Smart in the USA ‘This was a coast-to-coast drive story for Car, which took seven days to complete. This shot was taken when we decided to take a bit of an inconsequential-looking side turn. We kept going and kept going until this vista appeared, and I was like “F***me! This is the shot!”’ Nepalese street scene ‘Henri Cartier-bresson was a big influence on me, which is why I love this shot. I took it with one of my Nikon F3s, on an assignment to Nepal in the late ’80s. The woman stands out against the background, and there’s real texture in the shadows. It’s an image of nothing in particular, but to me, it’s an almost perfect nothing.’

Aston Martin Vanquish, Scotland ‘Another Xpan shot for evo .For me it was a revelation to have all that space for a picture. I mean, this is just a shot of a car parked at the side of the road, but I love how Xpan images are sharp right into the distance. You feel like you’re there, on windswept Rannoch Moor.’ Man on donkey ‘That’s in the Atlas Mountains, on the way through… I don’t remember the job, but this was another “moment”. He is perfectly placed within that white wall, but surrounded by all the chaos that’s going on in those mountain passes. Later we caught him up and he invited us to stop and drink mint tea.’ E-type in the Mojave ‘I shot this for a book celebrating the E-type’s 50th anniversary. We took the car from Frank Sinatra’s house in Palm Springs across the Mojave to a casino in Las Vegas. I just love the incongruity of that beautiful British car in that epic setting. You just want to be doing that journey. ’