Allan de la Plante is known for catching the action.
A resident of Burnaby, BC, his life’s work has been spent chasing speed, whether international car racing, hockey, downhill skiing or horseracing. He produced an early portrait of Sandy Hawley in 1973, a young jockey who had just won an astonishing 515 races; he did a shoot with ‘The Shoe’, Bill Shoemaker; he covered the famous Russia-Canada hockey series in 1972; he followed the Crazy Canucks in World Cup downhill skiing. Along the way he was named official Canadian and COJO photographer at the Montreal Olympics in 1976 and created the First Canadian Gallery of Athletes, a collection of portraits.
Allan de la Plante.
De la Plante spent 18 years shooting in the high-octane world of Formula One, plus other racing series including Indy and Can Am. “It was fun, but I lost a lot of friends,” he said. “I was photographer to one of the Ferrari drivers who unfortunately was killed.” That driver was the fiery young Canadian Gilles Villeneuve. De la Plante recorded Villeneuve’s meteoric rise and after his untimely death in the fall of 1982 at the age of 32, he released Villeneuve, an award-winning photographic essay about his friend’s racing life. In 1996 Canada Post released two commemorative stamps in memory of Villeneuve based on de la Plante’s work.
The loss of his friend hit de la Plante hard and he stopped shooting car racing, opting for other sports instead and eventually navigating back to a different form of horsepower. In 2010 de la Plante “talked my way onto the backstretch at Hastings and fell in love. The horses and the people who love them are now my passion. Since then I have shot the Queen’s Plate, Ascot and the Palio di Siena. I search out the special ones, but delight in the regular, too.”
But sport is not the entirety of de la Plante’s body of work. He produced Celebrate Our Faith, the official book of the Canadian tour of Pope John Paul II in 1984. He honoured Canadian firefighters in 1993 with Flame of Courage. He showcased beautiful BC locales in Malibu and Bowen Reflections and has written two novels, The Summer of Arnie Trout and Heffer’s Secret.
In May of 2022 de la Plante was honoured by being inducted into the The Canadian Motorsport Hall of Fame for his work. “At 78 years of age, any recognition is nice,” he said with a laugh. And he is still following the action with his camera, this time BC Lions football when he’s not at the track.
Who knows what’s next?
