Imagine being at the Cheltenham Racecourse: tweed, binoculars, impeccable outfits, gleaming shoes, bookmakers, pints of beer and a crowd that, for a few minutes, stops being a crowd and becomes a single body, straining toward something that hasn’t happened yet.
It’s precisely in this interval that Tom Pitts concentrates his attention, a British photographer working in street and documentary photography, born and raised in the UK and now based in Cheltenham. His project Under Starters Orders, dedicated to the crowd at Cheltenham Racecourse, tells the story of the races by looking elsewhere, in an unconventional way. Tom Pitts focuses on hands, clothes, glances, down to small rituals and, above all, that suspended moment in which a possibility can still turn into anything at all. The project was published in the fourth issue of The Raw Society Magazine in December 2025.
The Cheltenham Festival takes place over four days and is one of the central events of the British National Hunt season. In 2025 it recorded 218,839 total attendees, with more than 68,000 spectators on Gold Cup day. These numbers might suggest a spectacular photograph of the race itself, with horses charging toward a fence, jockeys, winners and champagne. Pitts instead chooses to literally turn his back on the track.
His camera settles on the people and on their reactions. It’s a seemingly simple choice, but it completely changes the nature of the story. The horse becomes almost an off-screen element, and the central interest is the human system revolving around it. In the photographs of Under Starters Orders, the racecourse thus appears as a kind of social theatre, where every spectator plays their own role while simultaneously watching everyone else’s.
The result is particularly evident in the images of the series: an umbrella suddenly turns a rainy scene into a small pictorial composition; three pairs of legs and a few beers convey a pause far more effectively than a frontal portrait would. These are photographs in which the main event always seems to be happening just a few inches outside the frame.
In his photography, Tom Pitts doesn’t necessarily look for the “extraordinary” moment, but rather for the instant in which several ordinary elements, for a fraction of a second, click into place. Pitts has said it took him time to build the confidence needed to photograph people up close, also drawing a distinction between street photography, where the event is random, and documentary work built around a specific subject. His gaze, then, stems from observation, but also from the ability to stay inside a situation long enough to let it reveal itself.
The title Under Starters Orders is particularly effective because it isn’t only about the horses. In racing terminology, the phrase refers to the moment immediately before the start. Pitts turns it into a psychological condition, in which everyone is waiting. The crowd can be divided by age, clothing, financial means or relationship to the races, but during those few minutes these differences seem momentarily suspended. Tension passes from one face to another, from hands clutching a glass to those holding the race programme, all the way to bodies leaning forward to see.
In this sense, Pitts isn’t simply photographing a community gathered to watch a race. He is photographing the mechanism through which a community temporarily forms.
Before Under Starters Orders, Pitts had already gained international recognition with The Commute, a series shot in Cheltenham and London during 2023, which won the Street category at the 2023 Hasselblad Masters, selected from tens of thousands of entries. The project observed people during their daily commutes, focusing on the silent emotions and relationships we normally pass through without noticing.
The shift from public transport to the racecourse, then, isn’t as radical as it might seem. In both cases, Tom Pitts observes people who share a space and a wait, often without knowing one another. The context changes, the social code changes, but the same curiosity remains for what happens between one moment and the next: while waiting for a bus, while waiting for a race, while waiting to find out whether a choice was the right one.
Looking at Pitts’s images, it’s natural to think that his true subject isn’t movement, but the waiting for movement. A race lasts only a few minutes; what Pitts photographs is everything people do before, during and especially around those minutes. That’s why Under Starters Orders works even without knowing the rules of horse racing. There’s no need to know which horse the man with the binoculars has bet on, or what a wager is worth. And it’s perhaps precisely there that Tom Pitts finds his photograph, not in the decisive instant of victory, but in the moment immediately before it, when everything is still possible.
