Richard Kelley

I am in turn a photojournalist, writer, broadcaster and historian. I gravitated to the works of W. Eugene Smith, Magnum photographers; Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Joseph Koudelka. Their common approach became my mantra: make images that tell a story; withdraw; disappear; leave vanity aside; and make emotional, elegantly composed images that point to a truth about your subject. From 1972 to 1984, I captured the intimate moments of drivers fighting to survive in F1, a time that was forcing the most significant changes to drivers, cars and technology in history. Grand Prix. 

From the beginning, it was clear that these technological developments influenced the spirit, the passion and the courage that I registered at that time, and I decided then to adopt the style of Cartier-Bresson and to become "a fly on the low wall"; get as close as I could to these pieces of history, without influencing the emotion or drama of the moment. 

Throughout the decades that followed, working in the press or heading departments of international automotive brands, I could not forget my intimate Grand Prix images that I had captured while being a "fly on the wall". in the world of Formula One. So I brought them together to present them to the general public. I also returned to creating new digital works, both monochrome and color, oriented to time and its influence on nature and the world at large.