T. Taylor Warren oral history interview 1, 2005 December 7

Description

T. Taylor Warren reflects on his life, his photography career, and the early days of photographing NASCAR racing. He recalls his budding interest in photography as a boy and describes his education at Rochester Institute of Technology and the teachers he met there. Mr. Warren explains how he began photographing stock car races and describes how his career developed over the years alongside the sport of stock car racing. He discusses in detail the craft of stock car photography from the techniques and procedures he developed to the different kinds of cameras he used in his work, most notably a Hasselblad medium format camera. He also speaks at length about the differences between sports photography and photography for advertising and publicity. From 1957 to 1971, Mr. Warren was the official photographer for Bill France Racing and he recounts his experiences working for the founder of NASCAR. Throughout the interview Mr. Warren also talks of the various companies he has worked for, including DuPont, Kodak, Alderman Studios, NASCAR; and his own photography business, Pictures Incorporated. Mr. Warren concludes by discussing how photography and the business of stock car racing photography in particular, has changed due to the Internet, digital cameras, and improvements in technology. He shares his opinions on how today's photographers can capture higher-resolution images but may not create particularly compelling photographs due in part to the negligible cost of creating many images at a time with digital photography.

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