FASTER: The Pomona Drags examines a remarkable, head-on confrontation between two technologies that have shaped the Southern California psyche - cars and cameras.
Drag racing is the ultimate expression of Southern California's cult of speed. Like Hollywood camera culture, it's a home-grown phenomenon. The 7,000 horsepower engine of a top-fuel dragster burns through volatile nitromethane at eleven-and-a-half gallons per second pushing the 2,225 pound package of car and driver from zero to 330 miles per hour in 1,320 feet. The dragster is the quickest-accelerating machine on earth. Hit one hundred miles-per-hour in the first second, or you've lost the race. "Though perfectly useless in any 'rational' sense," writes historian of technology Robert C. Post, "a dragster is by any measure a mechanical marvel." And if drag racing has a shrine to the marvelous, a top contender is the straight line, quarter-mile course at Pomona.
When drag racing exploded off the starting line at Pomona in the 1960s, a small group of photographers were there to capture the action, if they could.
Susan Sontag defined photography as the "meta-art," the art that devours all others. But in the case of the drags, the contest was a dead heat. That tension permeates the proof sheets-photographers confronted with the speed and fury of drag racing and sorting out how to tackle it as they went along. The photographers knew they had to shoot the start, a piece of the hurtling action, and the trophy presentation. Beyond that, they just tried stuff.
In the 1960s, the language of drag racing photography was not yet codified. The drags were too new and they were evolving too quickly. Said another way, the photographers had the advantage of not knowing precisely what they were doing, so they could give anything a shot. Drag photography echoes 1960s rock and roll, an explosion of experimentation that took less than five years to go from I Want To Hold Your Hand (October 17, 1963) to Why Don't We Do It In The Road (October 9, 1968).
The photographers aimed their cameras at racing powered as much by enthusiasm as by nitromethane. Jose Ortega y Gasset defined technology as"the production of the superfluous" The early drag racers launched into superfluous production with intelligence and zeal. "Big Dadd" Don Garlits, Mike Snivley, Connie "The Bounty Hunte" Kalitta, Pete Robinson, and Don "The Snak" Prudhomme, piloted one innovative machine after another. In 1962 alone, twenty-seven world records were set, then smashed.
Drag racing, like photography, was in a state of accelerated evolution. Said driver Don Jensen: "We started with a clean slate. All that was needed was for the car to start and with luck stop afterwards, but that wasn't mandatory and many didn't." Things were happening so fast in the 1960s that racing was unclear about the basics. Should the engine be in front of the driver or behind? Engines were most often in front, at least until the moment an exploding gearbox on a front-engine slingshot dragster blew off half of Don Garlits' right foot. When Big Daddy spent the off-season moving the engine to the rear, he revolutionized the sport.
Meanwhile, at the starting line and on the smoke-clouded sidelines, the photographers jacked up their shutter speeds, picked their angles, and panned their cameras with the action. The snap of the shutter was often a fraction of a second late in a game where microseconds count. The frames are full of jittery motion. The best images are not slick, smooth and perfect, but retain artifacts of racing's speed and chaos. Frame edges bristle with accidental appearances. Somewhere is the smell of burning rubber and the roar of engines.
By the 1970's, the short-lived equilibrium of car and camera was over. Development doomed nearly all of the fourteen drag strips that dotted Southern California. White-shirted engineers and wind tunnel analysis began to supplant grease monkeys in local garages. Corporate sponsorship moved in at a level that left the glories of the Hurst Golden Shifter Girl in the dust; in the bargain, drag racing traded in blonde for bland. Don Prudhomme's Snake Dragster was put behind red velvet ropes at a museum. And Nikon handed photographers new weapons to conquer acceleration and speed.
Today's top-fuel dragsters are more powerful than ever. A current state-of-the-art dragster generates more horsepower than the first four rows of stock cars at the Daytona 500. But it is the cameras that have triumphed. My Nikon D2x has shutter speeds of an eight-thousandth of a second and will shoot 12.4 megapixel files at eight images per second.
More significantly, the camera is triumphant because it feeds a world increasingly accustomed to consuming second-hand images rather than direct experience. Industrial societies turn their citizens into image-junkies for whom, as Sontag writes, "participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form." Racing photography promises to deliver us racing; instead-scarcely a surprise-it propels us farther into the world of photographs. So, enjoy the images, and make it to the races if you can.