Peter Cripps Photography

I’ve always been impressed by people who are able to create their biographies with seeming photographic recall of when and where they were, who they spoke to, what they smelt and saw and felt decades back in their lifetime.

For my part, I can barely remember what I did last week and to be able to remember with such crystal clearness what I did when I was five, 15 or 50 is a hopeless task.

Which brings me to this series of recently discovered images – my (ahem) “motocross days”. I have no recollection of where or exactly when I took these images, what the event was or why, for goodness sake, I decided to travel to wherever it was to take such images.

Sport has never been a great interest of mine. I hate football, cricket, tennis and golf with a passion and even the one thing I used to be moderately interested in, athletics, bores me to tears these days. However, here is the photographic evidence that I once attended an event to photograph a bunch of guys tearing around a muddy field on motorbikes, some with sidecars.

As a first attempt at sport photography I don’t think these are too bad but I was clearly not motivated enough to try it again. All I have for my efforts are two rolls of Ilford HP5 film with a vague idea these were taken in or around 1979 with my trust Nikkormat FT2.

I guess I was experimenting with what genre of photography I was interested in and thought I might “get into”. This was a stage that quickly came and went but here, for historical purposes are my first and only attempts at motocross photography.