ArtistSwedish
Kenneth Olausson
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Kenneth Olausson was born in 1948 in Sweden and came to photography not through art school but through teenage obsession with speed. At fifteen, he borrowed his father's box camera to photograph Formula 1 world champion Jim Clark at the Gellerås circuit - an act of improvisation that set the course of his working life. What followed was not a conventional press photography career but something closer to a dual vocation: more than two decades covering Swedish and international motocross, and a parallel decade-long immersion in Formula 1 that became inseparable from a personal friendship.
His motocross years began in the early 1960s and expanded steadily. He travelled with the generation of Swedish riders who dominated the sport internationally - Rolf Tibblin, Bill Nilsson, Torsten Hallman, Bengt Åberg - following them to world championship races across Europe and beyond. In 1967 he arrived in California and borrowed one of the continent's first Husqvarna bikes to ride an event in the Mojave Desert, returning two years later with his camera to cover the Inter-AM races. That combination of participant knowledge and photographic instinct produced images with the insider quality that distinguishes the best motorsport photography from reportage.
In autumn 1968 he met Ronnie Peterson, and what began as a journalistic connection became a close friendship that lasted until Peterson's fatal accident at Monza in 1978. Olausson was present at nearly 50 of Peterson's 123 Grand Prix starts, giving him access - physical and emotional - that no credentialed press photographer could replicate. His images from Monaco 1969 (Peterson's F3 breakthrough), Monaco 1970 (his F1 debut), the Dijon victory in 1974, and Monza 1970 constitute a primary visual record of a driver who became Sweden's most significant Formula 1 figure.
In 2019, Olausson organised a two-hour presentation at the Berwaldhallen in Stockholm, accompanied by a 40-page signed booklet of his text and photographs, revisiting the Peterson years for a new audience. In 2023, his work was exhibited at Oak Island Gallery in Stockholm as part of 'F1 Euphoria', a project combining his historical images with new photographs by Per Olsson of the Lotus 72 - Peterson's championship car - shot at Classic Team Lotus in Hethel, England. The exhibition ran through November 2023 and positioned his archive within the contemporary fine-art market for motorsport photography. Prints from the series, including 'Death Race Monza-70', are available as signed limited editions.
His ongoing project is documented at olaussonphoto.com, where his archive of motocross and Formula 1 images from the 1960s and 1970s remains available. On the auction market, his photographs have appeared at both Bukowskis and Auctionet. The 11 items on Auctionist are exclusively held at Bukowskis Stockholm, all categorised as Photography, and centre on the Peterson archive - from the Monaco F3 race of 1969 to race scenes at Spa and Jarama. The highest recorded sale in the database reached 503 SEK for 'Ronnie Peterson in F3, Monaco, 1969', confirming that his market presence on the secondary auction circuit remains modest relative to the historical weight of the images.