A Lego Detour with photographer Dominic Fraser
Car photographer Dominic Fraser turned a lockdown diversion into an Instagram sensation thanks to his brick and click skills.
Dominic Fraser has shot for Britain’s best car magazines and finest brands from Aston Martin to Bentley but, when the coronavirus pandemic closed in, the full-scale shoots stopped so he turned back the clock and turned up the creativity to keep busy.
“When lockdown came and all the work ended straight away, it was like a guillotine,” he says. “Like everybody else, I just sat down and was looking at social media and I saw somebody do a little time-lapse build of a Lego Audi quattro. It was my favourite rally car when I was a kid so I thought, I've just got to get one of those.
“It arrived two days later from Amazon. My partner's got two kids and they've got loads of Lego men and stuff and I thought I wonder if I could recreate one of those rally scenes that I remember from when I was 10 years old? So I did one, and posted it on Instagram. And then people went, t’'hat's amazing, do another one, do another one.’ So I just kept on going from there.
“When I first started doing it, I did a Google image search for Audi quattro rally cars and looked for pictures that captured the essence of what Group B rallying was like. The number of spectators, where the rallies went and how fast the cars went was nuts. Once I’d picked a shot I'd look at it and try and work out how it was shot in the first place, whether it was a wide angle lens or a telephoto lens for example, and then try and look at the bits of the scene and put it all together using the equipment I've got. Before lockdown, I never shot anything so tiny so it was all a learning process.”
Since that first quattro Fraser has photographed around 100 different scaled-down scenes, each one with a model and background that he has built himself. And while most of the cars are official Lego kits, every intricately detailed background is Fraser’s own work.
“One of the things that I discovered quite early on was that you really should only build what you can see. The first couple of times, I spent a lot of time building stuff that you couldn't actually see in the camera even though when you look at the original picture you can imagine the whole scene.”
Fraser’s ingenuity saw him raid the loft for as many Lego bricks and mini figures as he could find, and even the larder for extra authenticity.
“I used a lot of flour and quite a lot of coffee. Flour is for snow and dust and powdered coffee is good for dirt. I've got a little air blower that I use to clean my cameras and I put all the snow or the dirt or whatever in behind the car and then just as I’m pressing the button, squeeze the air to try and get it too look just right. It got very slippery on the floor in the kitchen because of all the flour.”
Fraser’s ‘studio’ has been the kitchen, the dining room and sometimes the garden, and while all the action has been caught in-camera, he has had to resort to Photoshop to remove wires that suspend jumping cars in mid-flight or for a colour change.
Despite having recreated images from dozens of other photographers, until Detour asked Fraser had never tried to re-imagine one of his own images from a favourite road trip.
“In 2008 I did a huge road trip with journalist Andrew Frankel. We were only out of the country for 48 hours but we went to six famous old race circuits and did about 2,000 miles in a Porsche 911. From Folkestone we crossed to Calais the went to Spa in Belgium, then the Nürburgring and Solitude Ring in Germany on the first day. The second day we went to Reims, Le Mans and Rouen before heading home. What a trip!”
Fraser’s photo of the Porsche in the iconic pitlane of Reims is another piece of photographic art and Lego creativity.
“It took a few hours to build the pitlane, and was a little bit more laborious than I’d expected but got there in the end. It sure did use a lot of bricks,” he says.
You can see more of Dominic Fraser’s amazing images on Instagram or buy a range of prints from his website.
