Maxine Oberlin

Maxine Oberlin is 31 and has spent eight of those years behind a camera, in the pits of half the circuits in America. Born in Dayton, Ohio, the daughter of an aircraft mechanic, she learned to develop film in her mother's kitchen. She started photographing street cars for a neighborhood paper and rose, photo by photo, to a motor racing magazine in New York. She is the only woman in the pits at many of the races she covers, and says each photo costs her twice as much.

In New York, she lives in a loft near the river, with a darkroom improvised in the bathroom, a light table covered in negatives and a high window overlooking the harbor cranes. Photo lines run across the room from end to end. The fridge holds more film than food. She sleeps late, wakes late and swears that midday light ruins any portrait.

She is thin and tall, with short wavy red hair, freckles on her face and red lipstick. She wears a white blouse with rolled sleeves, black cigarette trousers and flats, to walk any track. Around her neck, the twin-lens camera, which she only takes off to sleep. On her shoulder, the leather equipment bag, full of lenses wrapped in flannel. Quick, ironic, she measures words the way she measures light.

About the champion, she recounts the part she saw. At 8:48 the room phone rang, he listened and repeated the message, put on his jacket and left at 8:51. She stayed behind, putting away lenses. She also says that at 5 p.m., in the garage, the team director shouted for an advance in money, and the champion replied that he was not a bank. When the detective suggests she staged it all to sell a photograph, she answers there is no photo and that he should ask properly.

It could be the irony of a professional used to being distrusted for being a woman in a man's world. It could be the shield of someone who controls every word so as not to show what she feels. The detective will have to decide which.