Review from 000 magazine

Rennsport – Monterey 2018

Autograph is a small, feisty design and marketing collaborative loosely located within the area between Monterey and the Napa Valley, with its roots firmly planted in the garden of specialized motoring events. Or, in the most basic of terms, car guys on a weekend day pass that know how to take some damn fine photographs. Creative director Llew Kinst has assembled major talent to complement partner Allan Rosenberg’s decades of experience in commercial advertising imagery as well as his race photography. When not in his studio, Rosenberg can be found focusing his lens at Monaco and Le Mans, carrying on in the tradition of the great Jesse Alexander, whose photographs were a mainstay of Road & Track’s race coverage for years.

Kinst also has transformed the team’s skills at trackside photography into a series of instructional workshops for the general public. Held at a circuit, the program gets the student out of the classroom and over the wall to learn the techniques needed to get “the shot.” Another of Kinst’s projects has been the publishing of a yearly overview of the Monterey car week titled “9 Over 9” to indicate nine photographers covering nine days of events, and that template has been applied to coverage by Kinst’s team of the sixth edition of Porsche’s Rennsport Reunion in the pages of Rennsport – Monterey 2018.

At first glance the publication looks like any other upscale program sold at the gate, illustrated with images from previous events. Most programs don’t get looked at until after the event has ended (think of them as aperitifs to help settle a full meal), but Rennsport – Monterey 2018 delivers much more than just the viewpoints caught by the nine savvy photographers through their viewfinders. There is hardly a shortage of online and published images of the event, ranging from the amateur to the professional, but the shots by Kinst’s crew stand out by conveying an atmosphere of people having fun at a remarkable gathering. Providing this human context to familiar compositions of a car illuminates many of the photos and underscores the purpose behind this effort: To supplant the seriousness of a typical race weekend with a merry-go-round that gives rides on real painted ponies. Kinst has checked the scholarly attitude at the gate, and there are a few technical and historical mistakes, but they seem more to annoy the fact checkers as if to say “Yeah, we missed that one; we were too busy having a great time.”

A publication of this sort can easily fall into cliché, of little use except for those after a bit of nostalgia for those few fun days at the track. Would you rather have great photographs or great memories? Kinst offers both, and it’s almost impossible to pick up Rennsport – Monterey 2018 and not smile. Of historical note, 53,282 bratwursts were served over those four days. The tally of beer sales is still being revised.