Jon Nicholson

From Formula One motor racing and the Olympics, to UN relief work and the Goodwood Estate, Jon Nicholson has covered a vast range of subjects. Keith Wilson hears how he worked his love of documentary photography into the world of international sports…

Every working photographer dreams of the moment later in their career when they can bask in the recognition of a retrospective exhibition. For sports and documentary photographer Jon Nicholson, that moment arrived earlier this year, coinciding with the 25th anniversary of the death of three-time Formula One world champion Ayrton Senna, who Jon had photographed the day before his fatal crash in the 1994 San Marino Grand Prix. But like so many plans, the timing of his exhibition owed more to chance than a calculated decision to release a photo of a man who has become an icon of the sport that played a formative part in Jon’s extraordinary career…

Why have you decided that now is the right time for a retrospective exhibition of your work?

In the 1990s, when I was doing all these books with Damon Hill and sports stars, it was a good time in photography, so I was too busy! Plus I felt at 30 I wasn’t worthy of showing off all my work… Then a project I’d been doing for a private individual finished in mid-December last year and I was faced with the horror of, ‘Oh my God, what next?’ Meaning, I had a bit of time to look through my archive and put something together.

Was that when you found the old photo of Ayrton Senna?

this since that weekend, or doing that book project.’ I opened it up and the first or second contact had that picture on it. I scanned it and I sent it over to Damon Hill. It was quite haunting and I said, ‘Okay, next year I’ve got to do something with that picture. It will be 25 years…’ I wasn’t sure what to do with it. Then the people at Augustus Brandt gallery in Petworth asked if I wanted to have a show and I said, ‘Yes! How many pictures?’ It turned out to be a 100 pictures, but how can you show 35 years of work in a 100 images?