What does a Voigtländer camera, Napoleon and a giant tortoise have in common with Formula 1 photographer Clive Mason? The answer lies in a story from Clive’s childhood when describing how he got into photography. He said, ‘My father was an incredibly keen amateur photographer and while he was working in the Foreign Office we had this dreadful posting to St Helena, where Napoleon died in exile.’
A British Overseas Territory in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, St Helena is one of the world’s most remote islands. As Clive recalls, back in the 1970s, there wasn’t much for the islanders to do for leisure. ‘There was no TV, there was nothing, just the BBC World Service and that was it.’ Unsurprisingly perhaps, photography quickly became a shared passion between father and son on the remote outpost.
Clive continues, ‘We took this picture on my dad’s Voigtländer of a giant tortoise called Jonathan, who lived in the Government House grounds. We had our own little darkroom in our house and we printed it, and that was my first ever photograph of this giant tortoise.” Jonathan, who is believed to have hatched in 1832, is officially the oldest living land animal on Earth.
Clive is keen to go back and photograph him again ‘to bookend my career’ as he puts it. ‘That is where my interest in photography began, so when my dad died in 1977 – I would have been 10 – then that was all I wanted to do, to become a photographer.’
It might have been something of a slow start, photographing the ponderous gait of a giant old tortoise, but things have certainly sped up since then for Getty Images’ premier Formula 1 photographer…
How did your interest in sports photography originally begin?
That would have been. You’d work all week and when you got to the weekend, the old boys would be reluctant to cover the rugby, the football or the cricket, so I’d say, ‘I’ll go, I’d love to have a go at that.’ That’s how it all began – because they didn’t want to do the sport!
