The Photographers
The Library’s archival collections contain original diaries, engineering documents, letters, papers, photographs, and scrapbooks from individuals and organizations that have left their marks in automotive history and the pageant of motor sport. The Revs Digital Library contains over 700,000 photographs from 40 photographers. We celebrate their passion for the automobile and racing history, and the legacy of the automobile as the transformative object of the 20th century. The number of images is current as of September 2021.
| Photographer | Biography |
|---|---|
| Pete Biro | Pete Biro was one of the most sought-after motorsports photographers of the 20th century, his work appearing in Sports Illustrated, LIFE, Car and Driver, Road & Track, Autoweek, Hot Rod, Motor Trend, Sports Car Graphic and a host of other publications. Biro’s shot of Andy Granatelli bussing Mario Andretti in the winner’s circle at Indy is just one of a number of images that have come to define the genre. He also shot for a number of commercial clients, including a decades-long association with Goodyear. His collection consists of thousands of images covering races such as the Indianapolis 500, Long Beach Grand Prix, the 12 Hours of Sebring, and the Baja 1000. 8,400 images are available as of February 2022, and more are added on a regular basis. |
| John Blakemore | John Blakemore was a full-time freelance journalist and photojournalist who specialized in photographing Formula One, Can-Am, Trans-Am, and Motorcycle Grand Prix racing. He worked as a regular contributor to Road & Track, Car & Driver, Autoweek, Wheelspin News, Autosport Canada, and Grand Prix International among various other publications. His photograph collection consists of approximately 53,000 black-and-white negatives and color transparencies of Formula One racing, endurance racing, sprint racing, and SCCA racing from 1966-2004. There is a focus on Formula One racing, including images of events such as the United States Grand Prix, French Grand Prix, Swiss Grand Prix, South African Grand Prix, Monaco Grand Prix, Canadian Grand Prix, and more. |
| Albert Bochroch | Bochroch was a motor sports journalist and the author of books on racing. The collection of 11, 974 pictures is predominantly black and white images in strip negatives, contact sheets, and prints. He took the pictures at international endurance races like the 24 Hours of Le Mans and 12 Hours of Sebring, at Formula One Grand Prix races like Watkins Glen, New York, at racing series like the Can-Am, and at many other races during the 1960s and into the 1970s. |
| Ken Breslauer | Ken Breslauer is Media Director and Track Historian at Sebring International Raceway. His collection consists of 1,035 color transparencies and monochrome negatives and primarily documents the 12 Hours of Sebring endurance race from 1954-1993. It also includes images from the Giants Despair Hill Climb, Grand Prix of Miami, and sports car races at Daytona International Speedway. |
| Tom Burnside | Tom Burnside is a professional photographer who captured motorsports throughout his career. One of the features of his work is his fascination with the challenge of depicting speed on film. Many images in this collection feature his trademark “panning” technique. The collection consists of 32,304 negatives and transparencies of racing events such as 12 Hours of Sebring, Cuban Grand Prix, Venezuelan Grand Prix, Bahamas Speed Week, SCCA National Championship Races, and more. He captured many portraits of prominent racing personalities such as Phil Hill, Carroll Shelby, Alfonso de Portago, Stirling Moss, and Juan Manuel Fangio, among others. Many of the photographs in this collection were taken during the 1950s and 1960s. |
| Daniel Cabart | The collection of four images is a visual chronicle of French automobiles from the 1890s and early 1900s. French automotive historian Daniel Cabart collected over rare albumen images, glass negatives, and photo postcards of pioneering French marques, such as De Dietrich, Lorraine Dietrich, and Panhard et Levassor. Vehicles depicted include gas and steam engine automobiles and vehicles powered with electric motors. |
| Webb Canepa | Canepa was a professional photographer based in California and the collection includes 1,128 black and white images taken at California sports car events in the 1950s and 1960s. His repertoire includes the last race at Golden Gate Park, Pebble Beach, and the first race at Laguna Seca. Other notable races photographed were Stockton, Sacramento, Cotati, Tracy, Vaca Valley, and Lincoln. |
| Robert Canaan | Canaan was an employee of Kurtis Kraft, knew Frank Kurtis, and shot many of the cars as they were being assembled. The collection includes 4,177 black and white images taken from 1949 through 1955. Canaan’s photographs of the California sports car racing and hot rod scenes were often published in the period enthusiasts’ journals such as Road and Track and Hop Up. This collection features candid shots of California associated drivers like Ken Miles and Phil Hill, when they were beginning their careers in the early 1950s. |
| Marcus Chambers | Chambers was the Race Program Director for the British Motor Corporation (BMC) in the 1950s and 1960s. The collection includes 280 racing and rally images taken by Chambers while he was at BMC, and includes color images of noted women race drivers. |
| Al Cosentino | Alfred Cosentino was a noted Abarth race car driver, author, and operated the FAZA (Fiat Abarth Zagato Allemano) import center in Brewster, N.Y. His collection contains 2,408 glass negatives of Abarth-related images from the 1960s, including the Abarth factory, car portraits, and close-ups of various Abarth car parts. |
| Bruce Craig | Craig was a documentary photographer. The collection 36,811 images of American motor sports from the 1910s through the 1970s, and also includes photography of Ted Wilson and Vincente Alvarez. This vast array of prints and glass plate negatives cover oval track racing back to the days of the board tracks of the 1910s and 1920s. The Craig collection documents such famed venues as Ascot Park in California, Langhorne Speedway in Pennsylvania, and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. While primarily an archive of open wheel racing, including Indy cars, sprints and midgets, the collection also includes images of modified race cars and early NASCAR contests. In addition to the thousands of oval track racing images are a varied pictorial of early hill climb contests, souvenir images of race car drivers, track architecture, wrecks, pits and paddocks, and crowd scenes. |
| Didier Derauw | Derauw collected the 62 black-and-white photographs documenting early motoring history. |
| Suzy Dietrich | Dietrich was a sports car driver in the 1950s and 1960s. The collection consists of 372 color slides and black-and-white negatives documents sports car and Formula 5000 events at Mid-Ohio and Road America in the 1960s and early 1970s, the 1966 United States Grand Prix, 1980 Canadian Grand Prix, and photographs of Dietrich’s cars. |
| John Dugdale | Dugdale began his career in 1933 as a motor sports photo-journalist with Autocar magazine. In the 1960s and 1970s he held several important positions in the automotive industry, most notably as the public relations director for the Jaguar, Rover, and Triumph Division at British Leyland of America. The collection consists of 698 monochrome and color photographs from 1935 through 1948, and includes rare images of attempts at the Land Speed Record from Nazi-era Germany along the Autobahns, as well as John Cobb’s 1939 Napier-Railton land speed car at the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah. Other images include the French Grand Prix and German Grand Prix in 1938 and photographs of British driver Dick Seaman who raced for Mercedes-Benz in the late 1930s. |
| European Motorsport in the 1950s and 1960s |
An unknown photographer took the 2,337 black-and-white negatives and 41 color glass negatives in the collection. The collection is focused on the Nürburgring with images of the 1000 km endurance race from the late 1950s to 1968 as well as the 1952 and 1964-1965 German Grand Prix and the 1953 and 1969 ADAC Eifelrennen. The collection also includes over 600 images from the 1954 Grand Prix of Switzerland and a smaller number of images from Monaco, Le Mans, Monza, and Hockenheim. |
| Skip Eveleth | Eveleth worked in aviation with Whitney Aircraft and Sikorsky Aircraft and was a motorsport enthusiast. The collection contains 3,433 color transparencies that document B.S. Cunningham automobiles and American motor sports in the 1970s and 1980s, primarily covering NASCAR and Endurance Racing at Talladega, Sebring, and Daytona. Events featured include the 24 Hours of Daytona, 12 Hours of Sebring, Winston 500, and Talladega 500. |
| Edward Eves | Eves was the Vice-President of Marketing and Sales for Rover and Triumph in North America and a journalist, motor sports enthusiast, and automotive historian. His 3,486 images cover a broad swath of motoring in the 1950s through the 1970s and include publicity shots for Rover and Triumph import cars, motor races he covered, factory visits, and the engineering features of performance sports cars like Ferrari and Maserati. |
| Grand Prix racing in the 1930s | An unknown photographer took the 22 black-and-white images of Grand Prix races in England, Spain, France, Belgium, Germany, Italy, Monaco, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, Libya, and the United States from 1934-1939. |
| Eric della Faille | della Faille was a Belgian photographer, and his collection consists of 46,550 black-and-white negatives and color transparencies from the 1960s and 1970s. Most of the photographs are from European Formula One, endurance racing, and auto shows, with a smaller number from Daytona, Watkins Glen, Nassau, and Buenos Aires. |
| Geoffrey Hewitt | Hewitt was a motorsports photographer and the 184,401 images cover the period from the 1960s through 2000s. They document major and minor United States events of the Mid-West and East Coast, including SCCA club and Pro races, Can-Am, Formula 5000, United States Grand Prix, and IMSA. |
| William Hewitt | Hewitt was a professional photographer and cinematographer who worked in California outside of motor sports. His collection includes 21,240 black and white images of motor sports events on the West Coast. From 1953 until 1966, Hewitt photographed many of the major race contests at Pebble Beach, Laguna Seca, Riverside, Candlestick Park, Bonneville and at numerous other venues. Hewitt shot mostly as a racing fan, though he did occasionally publish photos in club and enthusiast magazines. |
| Bob Hines | The collection contains 2,569 black-and-white negatives and color transparencies. These images cover races from various series such as SCCA, Trans-Am, ARRC, and NASCAR GT 300. Notable venues photographed in this collection include Watkins Glen Circuit, Daytona International Speedway, Lime Rock Park, and Lake Garnett. This collection contains notable events including Watkins Glen 6 Hours, United States Grand Prix, and SCCA National. |
| Max LeGrand | The LeGrand collection consists of 3,497 color and black and white images shot mostly in Europe from 1958 to the 1970s. It includes Formula One and sports car races and is especially notable for images of drivers and the major Grand Prix Races. |
| Karl Ludvigsen | Karl Ludvigsen began taking photos for the stories he was writing in the 1950s for Sports Car Illustrated (now Car and Driver). His long career as an automotive journalist and executive gave him access to the many facets of racing and the automobile industry. His collection of 87,530 images covers races and events from the Americas and Europe including the preparation and technical development of Grand Prix, Indy, Sports Car, Can-Am, and Trans-Am cars. |
| Rodolfo Mailander | From 1950 through 1955 Rodolfo Mailander, a young Italian-German photo-journalist, took 30,869 photographs at the most important racing contests in Western Europe, which he sold to publishers.His work is a tightly focused five-year chronology of Porsche, Ferrari, Aston Martin, and Mercedes-Benz racing history. Many of the images are set in dramatic backdrops featuring the Alps, the Italian countryside, and historic villages. Mailander was especially attentive to the great endurance races and rallies of the early 1950 such as Le Mans, the Mille Miglia, and the Monte Carlo rallies. He also photographed the major international auto shows and salons in Turin, Geneva, Brussels and Paris. |
| Duke Manor | Manor was a photo-journalist who shot images in monochrome and color for automotive enthusiasts’ magazines. His collection contains 8,765 images of Can-Am, Trans-Am, and other sanctioned races between 1963 and 1972. From 1963 until 1967 Manor worked on the West Coast at races like Riverside and Laguna Seca, but in 1967 he had moved his operations to the East Coast, and was taking photographs at tracks like Bridgehampton and Daytona Beach. His work with high speed color film is noteworthy. |
| Jean Charles Martha | Martha was a Ford of Europe employee and was given complete access to the Ford company race team during the 1960s heyday of Ford racing efforts. The collection consists of 1,050 color transparencies taken at various European races, including candid images of race car drivers. |
| Jerry McDermott | The Jerry McDermott photograph collection includes 8,864 total images, mainly from 1950 to 2000. The collection includes images of IMSA, Can-Am, Formula One, vintage races and shows, various grand prix races, The Gunnar Cup, and IndyCar. Venues featured in this collection include Daytona International Speedway, Laguna Seca, Moroso Motorsports Park, Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, Texas World Speedway, Bicentennial Park, Sebring International Raceway, Autodromo Nationale Monza, Belle Isle Street Circuit, and Waterford Hills. |
| Don Morley | Don Morley had a long, storied career in motor racing photography. He photographed both motorcycle and car racing. Throughout his career, he has held several positions, such as being the Honda, Suzuki, and Marlboro Yamaha official team photographer, and spent eleven years as the chief photographer of the Grand Prix year book Motocourse. His collection consists of 6,222 images of various events such as the London to Brighton Veteran Car Run, European Grand Prix, London Motorfair, and more. |
| W.H. Murenbeeld | W.H. Murenbeeld became interested in motorsports when he attended the French Grand Prix with his parents in 1951. He then went to Le Mans in 1952, and the Grand Prix of Holland in 1953. When he attended the Player 200 at Mosport in 1962 he decided to take a camera and began his career as a race photographer. He has traveled around the world taking photographs and has had photographs printed in publications in over ten countries. The W.H. Murenbeeld photograph collection consist of 55,891 born-digital images. Various race events include: American Le Mans Series (ALMS) events such as Petit Le Mans; Grand-Am events including 24 Hours of Daytona, and others at Virginia International Raceway and Lime Rock; IRL events in Homestead, Toronto, and Watkins Glen; Porsche Cup races at Sebring; Ferrari Challenge in Homestead; and 24 Hours of Le Mans. |
| David Nadig | David Nadig was a photo-journalist in the late 1960’s who covered motor sport events held in the Eastern United States. He documented Sports Car, Trans-Am, and Formula One races, and his images were published in magazines like Car and Driver as well as in race programs. This collection includes 6,348 photo negatives. |
| Ove Nielsen | Swedish photographer Ove Nielsen was active in covering European motor sports from the mid-1970s to the mid-1980s. The collection of 18,360 images features Formula One races, including the drivers and pit scenes in both color and monochrome. |
| Nürburgring Racing in 1966 | An unknown photographer took the 12 color transparencies in this collection. The collection is focused on Nürburgring with images of the German Grand Prix from 1966. Drivers featured in this collection are Dan Gurney, Lorenzo Bandini, Pedro Rodriguez, Jim Clark, and Peter Arundell. Cars seen in action are a Lotus 33, Ferrari 312, Ferrari 246T, Lotus 44, and Eagle T1F. |
| Smith Hempstone Oliver | Oliver was a tenured curator of transportation at the Smithsonian Institute. Subjects in this collection of 1,204 images include racing contests, classic cars, personalities and automotive genre topics in a Depression Era context. The collection includes images made through his long association with the racing teams of Briggs S. Cunningham. |
| Bill Oursler | Bill Oursler contributed to magazines such as Road and Track and Car and Driver. Oursler has also written several books on Porsche racing cars and the brand’s competition history. He is now a contributing editor for the Porsche Panorama magazine and works with National Speed Sport News covering road racing. His collection consists of 11,202 images covering events such as the 24 Hours of Daytona, Watkins Glen 6 Hours, and various Trans-Am races. |
| Fred Pardini | Pardini was an award-winning photojournalist at the San Francisco Examiner. The 156 monochrome negatives were taken at the Pacific Grand Prix races in 1960 through 1963. |
| Stephen Peavey | Peavey was an amateur photographer and the collection contains 624 Kodachrome slides from the 1950s-1960s and documents sports car racing and rallies throughout the Midwest including venues such as Elkhart Lake’s Road America, Wilmot Hills Road Racing Course, and Meadowdale International Raceway. Also included are images from the 1955 and 1956 12 Hours of Sebring and a 1959 trip to the Porsche Factory in Stuttgart with the Porsche Club of America. |
| George Phillips | George Phillips – known as ‘Phil’ – was an MG enthusiast, amateur racer, and keen photographer when his friend Gregor Grant founded ‘Autosport’ magazine in 1950. Phil had entered his own special bodied MG in the first postwar 1949 Le Mans 24-Hour race, co-driving with wartime RAF pilot ‘Curly’ Dryden but failing to finish. Grant invited him to join ‘Autosport’ as photographer and they recorded the racing world together from 1951-1967, when he opted out to run a country pub, severing most of his racing ties. Phil covered most Formula 1 races and such endurance events as Le Mans, and he also shot extensively at auto shows, production car road tests and auto club races and tours. A large body of his work is shot in Great Britain. The collection includes 51,788 images of all the significant manufacturers and prominent race car drivers from 1948 through 1967. |
| Peter Blair Richley | Richley was a lifelong motor car enthusiast. Many of the 253 images are press and publicity photographs that he gathered at auto shows in London and Paris over several decades, but he also collected amateur photography, particularly photograph albums of early motoring tours. Some of the marques featured in the images include: Cadillac, Bugatti, Chevrolet, Jaguar, Infiniti, De Dion-Bouton, Dodge, and many more. He also had an eye for rarity and avidly collected photographs of custom body cars. |
| Royal Automobile Club Tourist Trophy at Ards |
The photographer is unknown. The collection consists of 28 glass plate negatives. 27 of these glass plate negatives are of the RAC Tourist Trophy races at the Ards Circuit in Belfast, Northern Ireland from 1928, 1930-1931, and 1936. Also included in the collection is a single glass plate negative from the 1930 Irish Grand Prix in Phoenix Park. |
| John Thomas | The collection consists of 667 color transparencies taken by John “J.T.” Thomas during his travels in the United States and Europe. Images include various locales such as Watkins Glen, NY; Riverside, CA; Indianapolis, IN; Le Mans, France; Nürburgring, and the Porsche factory in Germany; as well as through Brenner’s Pass in the Alps, to visit Ferrari in Italy. Images of the 1977 visit to the Porsche factory consist of the 1978 model Porsche production including engine assembly, transmissions, chassis, and bodies. |
| James Torpey | James Torpey was known as a professional race photographer, and his studio was Torpey and Murray Race Photos based in Connecticut. The collection contains 151 black-and-white negatives and color slides of various racing events during the 1950s-1960s, such as events from Lime Rock and Marlboro. |
| Robert Tronolone | Robert Tronolone’s collection contains 3,365 photographs. He photographed many West Coast races, predominantly IMSA, CART, USAC, NASCAR, and SCCA events from the 1960s through the 1990s. He also frequently photographed the Indianapolis 500. The processing of the collection is incomplete, and more images will be added. |
| Bunny Tubbs | Bunny “D.B. (Douglas Burnell)” Tubbs (1913-1999) was an active journalist from the 1930s to the 1960s. He was an editor for The Motor from the early 1940s to 1963. Tubbs also authored several books dealing with the topic of automobiles and Motoring Art. His collection consists of 17 color transparencies, including images of events such as the 24 Hours of Le Mans, the Swiss Grand Prix, and the Coppa Ciano. |
| Neville Robert von Dwingelo
|
von Dwingelo was in the United States Army Signal Corps and stationed in Europe, where he attended motor sports events. He took the 272 black-and-white negatives and color transparencies at the 1953 24 Hours of Le Mans endurance race, the 1953 French Grand Prix and 12 Hour endurance race at Reims. He also documented street scenes of automobiles in Europe, and New England Region SCCA activities. |
| Kurt Wörner | Wörner is a German photo journalist who had his works published in a number of auto sport magazines and books. His 9,027 images consist of 35mm black and white negatives from the 1970s, including photographic prints of sports car personalities and Porsche models. |
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