The work of the American photographer Jesse Alexander, who has died aged 92, captured an era of international motor racing in which the personalities of the drivers and the sleek lines of the cars they drove were not yet obscured by the visual noise of sponsors’ insignia.
At a time when competitors, photographers and journalists stayed in the same hotels, dined together and gave each other lifts to and from races across Europe, Alexander became a friend of many of the grand prix aces. Not just the Americans who crossed the Atlantic to try their luck during the postwar years, such as Masten Gregory, Dan Gurney, Richie Ginther and Phil Hill, the fellow Californian who in 1961 would become the US’s first world champion, but such European stars as Stirling Moss, Wolfgang von Trips and Jim Clark.
The action shots he provided for magazines such as Sports Illustrated and Car and Driver were outstanding, but the trust engendered by these personal friendships enabled him to take revealing photographs of the drivers in their less obviously heroic moments. A portrait of Clark at Spa in Belgium in 1962 showed not the elation of a young driver in the immediate aftermath of collecting the first world championship grand prix win of his career, but his exhaustion after a two-hour battle to fight his way up from 12th place on the starting grid to victory on a fast and notoriously dangerous track.
Alexander’s backstage shots could include the more light-hearted image of an informal backgammon game on the steps of a hotel between two playboy drivers, the Franco-American Harry Schell and the Spanish aristocrat Alfonso de Portago.
But they often reflected his interest in the less glamorous side of the sport, particularly among the men who wielded spanners and oily rags. “Perhaps the most important side of my work is the human side to it,” he once said. “A part of me somehow relates to the people who do the grunt work. In the 1950s the mechanics got their hands dirty and were as emotionally involved in the sport as the drivers.”
To that end, between trips to Formula One races, Le Mans, the Mille Miglia and the Targa Florio, he visited workshops and test sessions where he could portray the hard work undertaken away from the crowds and the spotlight. But even a photograph of a car being unloaded from a transporter, a factory interior or a shirtsleeved Enzo Ferrari conferring with his chief designer would be composed and lit with an eye developed through his admiration of such photographers as Edward Steichen, W Eugene Smith, Jacques Henri Lartigue, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Capa.
Born into a wealthy family in Santa Barbara, California, Jesse was the son of Florence (nee Lyman) and Junius Alexander and grew up in Montecito, close to the ocean. After boarding schools in Massachusetts and Connecticut, he returned to study photography at the University of California in Santa Barbara. Already car-mad, he bought an MG TD in which he drove to watch races at Pebble Beach, Golden Gate Park and his local track, laid out on an airfield.
In 1953 he travelled to Mexico to watch and photograph the Carrera Panamericana, a spectacular and highly dangerous four-day race over 1,900 miles of open roads, won by Juan Manuel Fangio in a Lancia. The following year Alexander took his wife and the first of their four daughters to Europe, where at the first race he attended, the French Grand Prix at Reims, the Mercedes-Benz team made their return to Formula One, with Fangio as the No 1 driver. A memorable photo taken during a break in practice for that race shows the 42-year-old Argentinian perched on a pit counter as three younger drivers – Eugenio Castellotti, Peter Collins and Olivier Gendebien – listen intently to what he has to say.
In 1958 Alexander commissioned the architect Ernst E Anderegg, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, to design a house for his family in Hohfluh, Switzerland, where his motor racing friends often came to stay. Once built, its appearance so scandalised the local authorities that they changed their building regulations.
Covering thousands of miles in a Porsche coupe laden with the latest cameras, Alexander was a regular presence at the circuits until the early 70s, thereafter making occasional trips back to Europe for the 24 Hours of Le Mans or, latterly, the Goodwood Festival of Speed.
Outside motor sport, he co-directed short films about Billingsgate fish market in London in the 60s and the construction of a modernist house in the hills above Santa Barbara. He took pictures of Bobby Kennedy on the campaign trail and, in his later years, birds being cared for at a raptor centre. His several books of motor racing photographs include At Speed (1972), Looking Back (1982) and Driven (2000), for which Moss provided an affectionate foreword.
Alexander is survived by his second wife, Nancy, whom he married in 1965, their son, Jess, and his four daughters, Rori, Heidi, Andi and Susie, from his first marriage, to Patricia Beckham, which ended in divorce.
• Jesse Alexander, photographer, born 15 April 1929; died 14 December 2021
