Snap out of it!

Sir,

Am I the only person to feel intensely irritated by the antics of amateur photographers at race meetings? You see an interesting car in the paddock so naturally you want to look at it, to observe it, to enjoy its three dimensional wholeness. Almost inevitably, though. some punter with a camera will ask one to move so he can take a snap. He will then move on, suffering from the delusion that he has captured the car whereas, of course, he has merely reduced it to a small two dimensional image.

You resume your serious contemplation of the machine, but along comes another camera-toting twerp to interrupt. It seems characteristic of these people that they have not only lost the power to observe. but they seem to think it’s their right to interrupt others simply so they can point a lump of black Japanese plastic at a car. True enthusiasts take their time, as one does when looking at a painting, these myopic mountebanks teem only to want to snap a car as quickly as possible so they can scurry away to their next mark.

Possibly this letter could persuade all enthusiasts to ignore these feeble wretches in future. We might even take them to one side to counsel them, to persuade them to alter their ways and try to use their eyes instead of a glass lens. They are as painful and as pathetic as autograph hunters, whom they closely resemble.

Arthur Hambledon