It's a Race

The Cover & the Title

By James Robertson

March 27^th, 2023

The Cover & the Title

It is around 9 months post the release of It’s a Race, my book collating five years of photography of the Transcontinental Race (TCR). It feels like a milestone worthy of marking and I wanted to use the opportunity to share a few more images and some of the process behind putting the book together.

When it came to making the book I knew I wanted to share my five years of images of the TCR as a cohesive set, in a way they hadn’t been seen before. I am overly aware that the images I make of the TCR have little more than a brief existence on social media - and the occasional magazine article - and I thought they deserved more than that.

Mike Hall and Antonin Michaud-soret at the Hum Border Crossing, Bosnia and Herzegovina

Starting out I was drawn to working on a cover and a title (despite knowing the rest of the book should take priority) and, well, the saying never judge a book by its cover exists because that is what a lot of people do. I found myself back in a familiar situation trying to figure out which single image best represents the TCR and my images and what on earth to call it.

The clarity came while working with Josh Cunningham to put together the written content. Once we realised the best way to include Mike Hall, the late founder of the race, in the book was to transcribe a video where he talks about what the Transcontinental Race is, the title felt quite obvious. It struck a chord with me by encapsulating one of the biggest challenges I have encountered when trying to cover the TCR: how to convey the duality of a race that doesn’t look like any race we’re used to seeing. When every moment of every day is a race it stops looking like one at all. That’s what the book became for me, an attempt to answer the question, “What is the Transcontinental Race?” And it only felt appropriate to start by giving Mike’s answer to that question: “The first thing is the Transcontinental is a race.”

Kristof Allegaert refuelling at Guesthouse Zvono before heading into Durmitor National Park and onto CP4

[note: while that quote is the start of Mike’s video, the rest of it talks about the ways in which the TCR is not a race and the ways in which it being a race allows it to be treated not as a race, something I feel the book does too. Despite its title the majority of the content from riders and those involved in the race makes little mention of the racing aspect]

While I had been playing around with ideas for the cover it had been focussed purely on the aesthetics and now with the title in place it didn’t take long for the cover image to follow. One of my favourite images from TCRNo4 (the first TCR where I covered the whole race) was of Kristof Allegaert riding past a couple of cows as he passed through Durmitor National Park. He was firmly in first place and was the best part of a day ahead of the riders in second and third place and we guessed it would be our only chance to make images there before we had to head for the finish line in Turkey.

Who was Kristof really racing? It’s not the cows; and while it might have felt like it for us, he wasn’t racing us either; the cliche of racing himself perhaps? And in that way I think the image’s less than subtle nod to the race/adventure duality of the TCR is a fitting opening to the book.