May 2019

An unexpected email came this month from the owners of what was known to Martine as ‘The Newmarket Racing Forensic Laboratory’, a facility she shot for Sheppard Robson Architects in 1997. The original work was on 5×4″ transparency and published at the time in the architectural press.

Did she still have the images? Could they have access to them? Of course, however, they were not digitised and the request was to be able to make large wall prints for permanent display. As a result of the happy task of scanning and cleaning each sheet to create giant TIFF files then ensued. It turned out that 22 years later, some of the staff still worked there and the exercise became a happy trip down memory lane for both them and Martine when she and her assistant Sarah visited the site and learned much about the process of Dope Testing for the racing industry, spending time with a retired flat racer going by the unlikely name of Chubby.