![]() ![]() 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. ![]()
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