Beyond Basic Photography by Henry Horenstein

His earliest interest was in history and that has influenced his choice of subject matter from country music to burlesque. Henry is professor of photography at RISD and lives in Boston.Noted photographer Henry Horenstein was a student of Harry Callahan and Aaron Siskind’s.

He is currently in production on Where Everybody is Somebody, a film about Cajun Louisiana. In recent years, Henry has been making films: Preacher, Murray, Spoke, Partners, and Blitto Underground. His latest monograph, Speedway1972 was just published by STANLEY/BARKER. His Shoot What You Love serves both as a memoir and a personal history of photography over the past 50 years. 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. 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 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 Horenstein has been a professional photographer, filmmaker, teacher, and author since the 1970s. 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.

Here, my photographic heroes were the great chroniclers of urban life, Brassai and Weegee. You can see it in the styles of dress and hair and so much more. Still, all of this and the car racing world have undergone great changes. Both Seekonk and Thompson are alive and flourishing fifty years later. What better than an old-school sport that would certainly be extinct one day? I’m still waiting. There had to be good pictures there for a historian-with-a-camera in training. I was still in grad school and I was looking for subjects. II can’t remember, but I saw it as an opportunity. “I can get you a job at Thompson shooting the weekly program.” Paul and Dickie had friends in low places. 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). My brother-in-law Paul raced stock cars – old, beat-up cars customized for racing.

Again, not so much when I took them, as when I saw them decades later. I was looking through old, forgotten boxes of prints a couple of years back and found pictures I liked a lot. The Irene Carlson Gallery of Photography is pleased to present Henry Horenstein’s Speedway 1972, documenting Thompson Speedway in Thompson, Connecticut.

Beyond Basic Photography by Henry Horenstein