People smile at the car. That reads as a nothing statement until you know the thing lives in England, where drivers do not often smile at each other. The typical British vernacular between strangers is a flash of the headlights and at most a hand lifted an inch off the wheel. Thank you, or the opposite. The rest of the time everybody stares straight ahead through weather that stays grey more often than not. Roads full. Limits coming down for years, camera on a pole to make sure you noticed. A bright red 1965 Mustang fastback going the other way, and the faces changing, is worth something.
Steve Theo has had it three years. He is 72 and has been making photographs since 1970. He first saw the shape in a cinema. Grand Prix came out in 1966; he caught it a little later. What stuck was not the Formula One footage but the black and gold Shelby GT350 James Garner drives when he is not in the race car. “I thought, wow, that’s nice. For one day I’ll have one of those.” Bullitt did the same work, watched at school.
It took until 1988. That year he bought a 1967 fastback dressed as a Bullitt car. He is straight about it: not the real one, close enough, and fast. Other cars came through after, Minis and Coopers among them. Three years ago the red 65 turned up.
Three pedals is more or less the entire specification. He has no use for modern supercars and doesn't soften it. "Your granny could get in one and do 200 miles an hour, because you can't do anything," he says. It's the same argument he makes about cameras, and he makes it more often. He started in 1970, 16 years old and freshly expelled from school, in a London studio run by a man called John Maltby who set his own hair smoking with a cigarette halfway through the interview and then spent 14 years teaching him the job. It was architects and designers mostly, shot on sheet film under a black cloth.
He opened his own place in 1984 and went after fashion and still life for Glamour and Cosmopolitan and the Sunday supplements, sets built and lit and shot in camera because there was nowhere afterwards to fix anything. Weekends were his own, and he spent them at Brands Hatch and Silverstone photographing Senna and Lauda for nobody. In seven years he never got one frame of it published and he has the rejection letters to prove it. He developed the rolls at home in the bedroom with black curtains over the window, and printed everything himself, burning in and shading out with his hands under the lens and counting the seconds in his head because there was nothing else to count them with. He shoots digital now because the work requires it and he would rather not. "It's like driving an electric car. It does everything for you."
Olympia, Steve's wife, cannot drive the Mustang. The clutch is too heavy; she has asked more than once for an automatic and got nowhere. She can drive stuck, though. Learned in her brother’s E-Type, a black convertible she says was one of twelve in the country, on the theory that anyone who could park that thing could park anything. She still can. None of which she needs in order to like this one. “I don’t think there’s a sexier sound than the sound of the Mustang,” she says. “The look on his face when he’s driving it, he’s a completely different guy. He’s like in his element.”
The car turned 61 this year. Service, then straight back out, pointed at France with a friend and a lot of other cars. There is a group of them who do this; the plan does not get more complicated than going. Moments on the way, nothing they did not deal with. 1,200 miles. He came back calling it “fantastic.”
