LIFE THROUGH A LENS: TIM ANDREW
With a passion for shooting at night and exploring the possibilities afforded by digital technology, Tim Andrew’s car photography always stands out from the crowd. Here he tells his story and chooses his favourite images
He may make road testers miss their hotel dinner, but the results are always worth it. Tim Andrew talks about his career to date and picks his best shots
IT’S SIX IN THE EVENING ON A DREARY autumn Friday. It’s dark. We’ve been on the road since five in the morning, and shooting a group of family hatchbacks all day for Car magazine. The group static is already in the bag, yet photographer Tim Andrew has asked us to follow him a little way to ‘check something out’. As our little convoy approaches the A1 from the east, we’re expecting to turn left to at least begin our two-hour journey back south. Tim turns right. Drives for an hour north. Pulls up near some giant cooling towers for a power station. Drags his lighting equipment out of the boot. And in that moment reinforces his nickname amongst the journalists he works with as The Prince of Darkness.
It might not have felt so at the time for those of us standing around in the cold of a Friday night hours from home, but the results of Tim’s labours were worth our discomfort that day. And this tale is indicative of Tim’s approach to his craft – a total focus (no pun intended) on getting the best possible shot, no matter what. ‘Yes, I guess I did have a reputation for keeping journalists out late or missing their [car] launch dinner,’ concedes Tim. ‘But people got used to that and anyway, eventually I’d drop them off at the launch venue and then head back out again – it meant that I got the pictures I wanted and also got to drive the car, which was a plus.’
Entirely self-taught – apart from a few hours learning the basics of processing and printing black and white film – Tim started taking pictures aged 13. ‘It was my hobby at school and I just messed around and did portraits of people and actually earned money from it – I bought a lens out of the proceeds. When people left my school they handed out what amounted to business cards with their contact details on and their portrait, and that was my market.’
Tim’s eye for detail and ability to master complex processes – professional-standard
photoshopping from the dawn of the digital photography era, for instance, and currently 360-degree images of car interiors – were honed after he left school, in an unlikely setting but one where precision and logic count. ‘I didn’t do much photography for a couple of years. I worked for my dad rebuilding Hewland gearboxes for racing cars. It was his own company called Racing Gearbox Centre. I did that for a couple of years: he spent a little while showing me what to do and then after a couple of months I was the chief mechanic basically.’
Tim’s father was also responsible for his passion for cars. ‘Dad had a string of Lotuses in the early days and that’s partly why I have an Elise S2 now. One of the first cars I steered was a Lotus Europa, sitting on his lap around the grass paddock at Brands Hatch. Dad famously was the first person to put a Coventry Climax engine in a Lotus 6, and he fitted aircraft parts to it to make it even lighter: he achieved a Prescott Hill Climb record in it, beating the official Lotus team.’
It was a client of the Racing Gearbox Centre that assisted Tim on the path to a career in car photography (his head had already been turned in that direction by another automotive photographer, Mervyn Franklyn). Freelance journalist and motor racing enthusiast Gerard Sauer learnt of his ambition to shoot cars and got him a press pass to a BTCC race at Thruxton in 1983 as a trial of his talents. ‘This was for Performance Car,’ recalls Tim, ‘and they clearly liked the pictures because I covered the rest of the season for them.
‘I didn’t just shoot the racing,’ Tim continues, ‘I also shot some nice cars in the paddock and tried to give them something more than just a car thrashing around a corner. Performance Car then sent me on assignment to see what I could do away from the racetrack, and within months I was going off on photoshoots abroad. But it was for Fast Lane that I did my first press launch – the Audi Quattro Sport short wheelbase. I thought to myself, “Oh yeah, I’ve got myself the right job here!”’
To encourage Tim not to shoot anything else for its arch-rival, Performance Car offered him a monthly retainer and he stayed with the magazine for the next seven years, travelling the world, photographing and driving fabulous cars, meeting interesting and influential figures from the motoring arena. But then, after a six-month break to backpack around the world with his then girlfriend, now wife, Isalda, Tim fixed his sights on working for Car magazine.
‘I mean, that was the one, the leader, doing stuff that hadn’t been done before,’ he