PastImperfect:Louis Klemantaski
Motoring and motor sport have attracted some fine photographers down the years but one name stands above all others - Louis Klemantaski. The young Klemantaski wished only to be close to motor racing for which he had a passion and found his true calling by a somewhat circuitous route.
Born in Manchuria in China in February 1912, he was sent to England to prep school, leaving Manchuria for good in 1928 to study engineering in England. Two years later his father died and he no longer had the money to continue at university. He found a job as a mechanic with the Junior Racing Driver's Club (JRDC) and began taking photographs with a Box Brownie in his spare time.
One day at Brooklands, Klemantaski was getting a lift on a friend's motorcycle when they were hit by a car. Louis spent five months in hospital and received damages of £800 - a considerable amount of money in 1934. On his discharge, together with a friend, he spent the money on a supercharged MG Montlhery and a single-seater Austin 7 for hill climbing. He also transformed the JRDC into a school for racing drivers, but it failed to give him the income he needed. Undeterred, he began to look for a way to become "intimately involved in the racing world and make an honest penny".
In 1936 Klemantaski began to take photographs of motor races and to sell his pictures to the competitors. Using a primitive motor drive he photographed a Singer rolling down the Brooklands embankment and sold them to Speed magazine for 2/6 each. From that point on his future destiny was set. In the second World War Klemantaski's abilities were put to good use by the Department of Miscellaneous Weapons Development - Churchill's pet organisation.
Among other tasks, he photographed the bouncing bombs used by the Dam Busters. His photographs allowed scientists to establish how much rotation was lost each time a bomb hit the water.
After the war, Klemantaski continued to photograph motor racing but also found time to take profitable publicity pictures for various car manufacturers. The 1950s were also the period when Klemantaski did his finest work.
A series of books - today highly prized collector's items - brought his work to a wider public and established his name as the pre-eminent motor racing photographer. Some of his finest work came about when he rode as co-driver with Reg Parnell in an Aston Martin in the famous Mille Miglia in 1953. Two years later he repeated the experience before switching to a Ferrari driven by Peter Collins in 1956 in which the pair finished a superb second.
In the 1980s, shortly before his death, he sold his entire collection to an American publisher. The result has been new collections of his work - reproduced in colour for the first time - which show why this quiet man who began taking photographs as a means to get close to his motor racing heroes was the master of the genre.