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
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