The F1 Archive Nobody Could Buy: One Family’s 400,000-Photo Obsession
While most Formula 1 photo archives have long since been sold off to corporate buyers, one has stayed exactly where it started — with the family that built it. Since 1952, Bernard Cahier and later his son Paul-Henri have documented the sport through the lens, amassing nearly 400,000 photographs along with letters, plates, stickers and posters. Most of it is still sitting as physical negatives and prints, waiting for digitisation, treated as a family heirloom rather than an asset to flip.
Bernard was, by his son’s account, “the Cartier-Bresson of motor racing” — he knew everybody in the paddock, from Juan Manuel Fangio to Graham Hill and Dan Gurney, and that closeness bought him access today’s lanyard-wearing photographers can only dream of. Paul-Henri took a different, more dramatic route, favouring dark backgrounds and Caravaggio-style lighting. On Ayrton Senna, he’s blunt: “His face was very changeable, very expressive” — even as the Brazilian kept everyone else at arm’s length.
A fatal 1968 crash involving Jo Schlesser convinced the young Paul-Henri that a camera was a safer career choice than a steering wheel. Lucky for motorsport history that he listened — otherwise this archive wouldn’t exist at all.
Source: The Race
