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including the environs of Acropolis,
Delphi and Marathon. Some ecological
disasters were warded off, such as a plan
to divert the course of the Acheloos
River through central Greece. There
were also disappointments, including
the dislodging of Byzantine antiquities
by a metro project in Thessaloniki.
Costa Carras was born in England in
1938 to John Carras and Maria (née
Vernikou), who served in the London
Fire Brigade in the Blitz and contributed
to Greek humanitarian relief during
and after the Second World War. It was
from her that Carras inherited the
desire to fight for political change;
when Athens was under a dictatorship
between 1967-74, Maria financed an
anti-junta publication, The Greek Report.
At the age of two, Carras was evacuated
from London to join his maternal kin in
New York, returning six years later to
attend Harrow, which he found cold
and lonely. School holidays with grand-
parents, on the sun-soaked islands of
Chios and Sifnos, were a solace.
It was tough being a Greek at a grand
English school, when the two nations
were at loggerheads over Cyprus, and
Carras was bullied for standing up for
the Greek cause. He was, however, de-
termined to further his interest in world
affairs, acquiring a cherished collection
of maps and flags of all the countries be-
longing to the UN, and forming a close
friendship with Robin Butler, who later
became private secretary to five prime
ministers and head of the civil service.four-day incarceration giving history
lessons to detainees. It was typical of
Carras, who, even as he moved between
different milieus, causes and interests,
found ways to connect them. His
environmentalism, for instance, was
rooted in Christianity; he saw care for
the planet as a Christian duty.
In the final stages of cancer, Carras
renounced all of his public commit-
ments except one — a foundation hon-
ouring Metropolitan Anthony Bloom,
bishop of the diocese of Sourozh, the
Russian Orthodox Church in Britain
and Ireland. Something in the bishop’s
preaching and persona had touched his
young heart, and everything else, he
would say, flowed from that.
With his wife, Carras spent the final
three decades of his life in the historic
Plaka district of Athens, where their
beautiful but unassuming house served
as a base of hospitality and campaigning.
Lydia survives him with their son,
Iannis, a historian, and daughter,
Maria-Thalia, an art curator and writer.
By the time Carras died, most of his
neighbourhood, as well as historical
sites throughout Greece, owed their
protection to the tireless campaigning
of him and his wife.Costa Carras, conservation campaigner,
was born on April 6, 1938. He died of
cancer on February 28, 2022, aged 83Costa Carras
Scion of a shipping family and prominent conservation campaigner who founded Greece’s equivalent of the National Trust
In 1968 a zealous young reporter and
campaigner travelled to London from
her native Athens with a tricky
assignment: fellow opponents of
Greece’s military dictatorship wanted
her to galvanise support from the Anglo-
Greek community. Their prime target
was a dashing scion of a powerful
maritime clan who was scholarly and
idealistic.
Lydia Potamianou succeeded in her
task. At a social gathering she met Costa
Carras who, with a slim figure, aquiline
nose and inquisitive gaze, appeared a
little like an ancient Athenian sage.
Champagne flute in hand, she impressed
him with her worldly knowledge and the
talk turned to their homeland.
The pair fell in love. After marrying in
1970 they became partners in the strug-
gle for both Greek democracy and the
protection of Greece’s cultural heritage.
For Carras, the causes were interlinked:
Greece’s dictators, he argued, were doing
irreparable damage to the country’s
patrimony. The couple’s biggest project
was co-founding the Greek Society for
the Environment and Cultural Heritage,
which was likened to the National Trust.
After democratic freedoms were re-
stored, Carras helped to draft provisions
for the 1975 Hellenic constitution, in-
cluding the stipulation that “the protec-
tion of the natural and cultural environ-
ment constitutes a duty of the state and
the duty of every person”. He also used
the constitution to fight legal battles that
helped to save precious locations,
Though Jesse Alexander was a pre-
eminent photographer of the “golden
era” of Formula One, no cars are visible
in the most celebrated image of his
career. His greatest shot was a close-up
portrait of the Scottish driver Jim Clark
after his victory for Lotus at the
arduous Spa circuit in the 1962 Belgian
Grand Prix.
Handsome but haunted, his drained
face stained by marks from goggles
lowered to his neck, the photograph
evokes the emotional and physical toll
of motor racing even in a moment of
triumph. Clark would win the world
championship the following year but
die in an accident at the Hockenheim
track in West Germany in 1968.
An easygoing Californian, Alexander
owed his reputation not only to his pro-
fessional eye but also his relationships
with drivers in an era when the Formula
One world was smaller-scale and less
regimented. He nurtured contacts on
visits to factories and test circuits as
well as races and was on friendly terms
with Clark, who paused when he saw
Alexander approach, giving the photo-
grapher his opportunity.
“Somehow I was able to get myself up
on the podium, which today of course
would be an impossible nightmare,”
Alexander recalled. “Jimmy turned to
me and I had my Leica and I snapped.”
Proximity to drivers was a source of
anguish as well as an advantage: two of
his friends, a Briton, Peter Collins, and
an American, Herbert MacKay-Fraser,
were killed in crashes in the 1950s.
Frequent tragedies aside, Alexander’s
globetrotting life was scarcely less
glamorous than those of the famous
drivers he followed.
Born into a wealthy family in Santa
Barbara, the work of war photogra-
phers including Robert Capa sparked
his boyhood interest in photography.
British sports cars were imported to the
United States after the Second World
War and motor racing was increasingly
fashionable. Alexander bought an MG
TD and drove it to watch and photo-
graph Californian races often staged on
airstrips.
Alexander headed to Mexico in 1953
to cover the Carrera Panamericana, an
exceptionally dangerous 2,000-mile
road race won by Juan Manuel Fangio
and Gino Bronzoni. He sailed to Europe
a year later, touring the continent with
his wife and oldest child in a Volkswagen
microbus and becoming smitten with
Formula One at his first grand prix, in
Reims, France, in 1954. Fangio was
victorious in a Mercedes.
Freelancing for magazines, Alexander
attended other leading European racesin addition to grands prix, including the
Mille Miglia through Italy and the 24
Hours of Le Mans in 1955, when more
than 80 people died after a car crashed
into the grandstand.
Alexander settled in an imposing
house with spectacular views in the
Swiss Alps that was built for his family
in 1958. He appreciated the contorted
mountain roads, proximity to the
Porsche factory in Stuttgart and
German high-speed autobahns that
were blessedly lacking in law enforce-
ment. “You could really drive the way
you wanted to drive and not get in
trouble,” he wistfully remembered.
Alexander piloted a Porsche 356 andflirted with pursuing a racing career but
concluded he was better with a camera.
He was born in 1929 to Florence (née
Lyman), the daughter of the president
of a New England glue company, and
Junius, a paper-mill magnate. He met
his first wife, Patricia, while studying
political science at the University of
California, Santa Barbara. The union
ended in divorce. In the mid-Sixties he
married again, to Nancy, who survives
him along with their son, Jess, and four
daughters from his first marriage: Heidi,
Rori, an illustrator, Andi, a photo-
grapher, and Susie, an artist.
Grit as well as glamour drew his
attention and in 1966 he co-directed aJesse Alexander
Easygoing photographer known for capturing Formula One’s ‘golden era’ and for his friendly relations with the star drivers
KLEMANTASKI COLLECTION/GETTY IMAGES; JESSE ALEXANDER, COURTESY ROBERT KLEIN GALLERYEmail: [email protected]His reputation was somewhat re-
stored after his stellar school perform-
ance as King Lear was selected by The
Illustrated London News as one of its
best productions of 1956, professional
or amateur. It demonstrated a gravitas
that would prove useful in frightening
opponents during fierce public debates.
In private his acting talent shone in
heated games of family charades.
After school Carras gained a first in
classics from Trinity College, Oxford,
and could have become an academic
had duty not called him to the
family business, then headed
by his forceful father.
He had neither the
taste nor the aptitude
for business but, with
little choice, made
extended visits to
Japan where his
father was building
new ships, investing
his earnings in a Greek
bank, a shipyard, a resort
and a Greek vineyard, with
mixed results. The younger
Carras had the difficult job of
managing these assets, though his own
preference was for shipping. The well-
being of seafarers was a cause close to
his heart and he always insisted that his
vessels boast a decent library, which
was available to the entire crew.
In private moments, he began to
develop an appetite for art history
and conservation, persuading Englishfriends to support the little-known
monasteries of Mount Athos.
The return of Greek democracy in
1974 was bittersweet; catalysed by the
dictators’ disastrous coup in Cyprus, it
triggered a Turkish occupation of the
island’s north, uprooting more than
200,000 people. While some Greeks
forgot those travails, Carras did not. He
used lordly British connections to form
a parliamentary lobby group called
Friends of Cyprus, which has since
worked to promote a settlement. At a
time when prominent Greek
and Turkish Cypriots were
barely able to meet, he
brought them together
in London and, when
possible, on the island.
When war followed
the fall of commu-
nism in the Balkans,
he established the
Centre for Democracy
and Reconciliation in
Southeast Europe, which
involved the joint effort of
hundreds of historians from
the region in creating teaching
material on the conflict.
Carras also brought his wealth of his-
torical knowledge to less conventional
institutions. After he was arrested in
2008 for possessing unlicensed artefacts
(an incident seemingly engineered by
powerful figures who resented his
opposition to the construction of an
Olympic swimming pool) he spent hisshort film about fishmongers at
Billingsgate market in London. He
covered the Isle of Man TT race for
The Sunday Times in 1967, but went
back to the US that year, feeling worn
out and wanting a new challenge.
Living in a concrete edifice built for
him in the late Seventies on a hillside
overlooking the Pacific Ocean, Alex-
ander turned to nature. “I love taking
portraits of beautiful women,” he told
a reporter in 2014. “I enjoy birds. I en-
joy the beauty. Looking back, I wish I
had studied ornithology.” He pub-
lished about a dozen books, including
coffee-table fare such as Monaco
(2013), a collection of images of cars
and stars from the most alluring of thegrands prix. “He was the first motor-
sports photographer in the US to be
considered a fine art photographer,” his
friend Preston Lerner, a motoring jour-
nalist, said.
As Formula One grew ever more
moneyed and corporate — though
safer — his images were admired for
their nostalgic appeal as well as their
technical excellence. “We were a tight-
knit group. It was a small community
and we were all friends — the drivers,
the mechanics and the journalists. We
were sort of an extended family,”
Alexander said. “I had total access to go
where I wanted to go. There are many
more media people these days and
there’s a hierarchy of who gets to go
where. There is so much more money
and so many more people involved. It’s
a different world.”Jesse Alexander, motorsport
photographer, was born on April 15, 1929.
He died on December 14, 2021, aged 92‘I had total access to go
where I wanted. It’s a
different world today’
Jesse Alexander at Le Mans in 1957. His most celebrated image was of Jim Clark, victorious in the 1962 Belgian Grand Prixs B c T b o h o a p ajo
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