The Irene Carlson Gallery of Photography is pleased to present Henry Horenstein’s Speedway 1972, documenting Thompson Speedway in Thompson, Connecticut.
I was looking through old, forgotten boxes of prints a couple of years back and found pictures I liked a lot. Again, not so much when I took them, as when I saw them decades later.
My brother-in-law Paul raced stock cars – old, beat-up cars customized for racing. Paul’s cousin Dickie Simmonds owned the local Gulf station and modified the junkers that Paul drove at places like the Seekonk Speedway (Seekonk, MA) and the Thompson Speedway (Thompson, CT). Paul and Dickie had friends in low places.
“I can get you a job at Thompson shooting the weekly program.”
“Sounds good. What does it pay?”
“Hmmm. It’ll look good on your resume.”
Maybe they paid me a little. II can’t remember, but I saw it as an opportunity. I was still in grad school and I was looking for subjects. There had to be good pictures there for a historian-with-a-camera in training. What better than an old-school sport that would certainly be extinct one day? I’m still waiting. Both Seekonk and Thompson are alive and flourishing fifty years later.
Still, all of this and the car racing world have undergone great changes. You can see it in the styles of dress and hair and so much more. Here, my photographic heroes were the great chroniclers of urban life, Brassai and Weegee. In SPEEDWAY, I wanted to do what they did – to show us a slice now of what the world looked like then – here, small-town New England 1972, dutifully recorded and preserved.
—Henry Horenstein
About the Artist
Henry Horenstein has been a professional photographer, filmmaker, teacher, and author since the 1970s. He studied history at the University of Chicago and earned his BFA and MFA at Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), where he studied with legends Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind.
Henry’s work is collected and exhibited internationally, and he has published over 30 books, including several monographs of his own work such as Honky Tonk, Histories, Show, Animalia, Humans, Racing Days, Close Relations, and many others. He has also authored Black & White Photography, Digital Photography, and Beyond Basic Photography, used by hundreds of thousands of college, university, high-school, and art school students as their introduction to photography. His Shoot What You Love serves both as a memoir and a personal history of photography over the past 50 years. His latest monograph, Speedway1972 was just published by STANLEY/BARKER.
In recent years, Henry has been making films: Preacher, Murray, Spoke, Partners, and Blitto Underground. He is currently in production on Where Everybody is Somebody, a film about Cajun Louisiana. Henry is professor of photography at RISD and lives in Boston.
Image Credit: Thompson Speedway, Thompson, CT 1972 © Henry Horenstein, Courtesy of the Artist