Tom Burnside Collection
On and off for 15 years beginning in 1954 Burnside chronicled the emerging U.S. sports car racing scene, mostly along the East Coast but with occasional forays west to Elkhart Lake and Eagle Mountain, and as international racing came to the Americas he covered that too: the 12 Hours of Sebring, a Can-Am Race in Bridgehampton, a Players 200 in Mosport, Nassau Speed Weeks, Grand Prix races in Cuba and Venezuela and even one in Puerto Rico. He was in Caracas in 1957 when the Maserati team self-destructed, at Sebring in 1964 when three of Carroll Shelby’s Cobras finished just behind the winning Ferraris and in 1965 when Jim Hall’s Chaparral beat the odds and won it all.
Burnside's archivally-printed, limited edition prints have formed several major one-man exhibitions and grace collections in Japan, Europe and throughout the Americas. Six hundred black & white photographs reflecting his insider's view have been collected in the Book: American Racing: Road Racing in the 50s and 60s. His racing photographs and personal reminiscences have appeared in Forza, Christophorus (Porsche's Magazine) and the 2-part French cable TV production "Portago, Un Clochard Magnifique.” His photographs can be seen in numerous publications worldwide.
• More about Tom Burnside
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Sheer Drama (12)
Tom’s response to the challenge of depicting “speed” on film, beyond simply panning a camera in sync with a moving object, was to combine different cameras and lenses, films and shutter speeds, angles and distances and depths of field to induce a wide variety of visual effects. In the absence of crowd control and security precautions, and some might say plain common sense, he shot from track-side, cars scooting past his nose or coming straight at it. Drivers sometimes waved. It was different then. Here are twelve signed, 16”x20” Ultrachrome prints from those days. -
Behind The Scenes (12)
Tom Burnside photographed motorsport in the 1950s and early ‘60s, before racing became big business and secrecy and security measures distanced drivers both from each other and from the press. With this privileged vantage, combined with his love for cars and his skill honed in human-interest photojournalism for LIFE magazine, Tom produced a unique, behind-the-scenes archive of early sports car racing, imbued with a sense of timelessness. Here are twelve signed, 16”x20” Ultrachrome prints from that archive. -
Early Days (12)
For much of the 1950s in rural America, racing was just plain fun. The family car was driven to the local circuit, hung with a number and entered in a weekend of racing. It was a time for Americans to test out their home-made Specials and European imports on blocked-off road circuits, improvised airport courses and finally, tracks purposely built for racing. Many of Tom’s photographs from this period convey an elegance and solitude that bespeak an amateur sport, qualities we no longer associate with racing. Serious racing did exist – the Maserati team’s self-destruction in Venezuela in 1957 gave Ferrari the world championship – but the early days are most beloved in retrospect for the sheer joy that has been lost. Here are twelve signed 16”x20” black and white Ultrachrome prints from that special time.
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