In the late 1980s through the mid-to-late 1990s, East Coast photographer John Flory shot nearly everything that moved: AMA Superbike, East Coast CCS club races, and the early WSBK rounds at Mosport and Brainerd. He was everywhere—talented and prolific. His day job was developing film at some foo-foo East Coast college, and sometimes when he came to the track he looked three clicks off a vampire from spending half his life in the darkroom.

Okay, Flory wasn’t Brian Nelson or Tom Riles, but he was okay-good—and generous. He’d help others, talk for hours on the phone, and buy dinner for freelancers he knew were sleeping in their cars at the track for very valid reasons.

His pre-Internet filing system for negatives was more than a filing system; it was a true archive. Date, track, rider, probably film stock—Flory was an Excel database before Excel even existed.

And then, suddenly, he was gone. The media-center lifers realized he’d been missing for a few rounds. Calls to his usual numbers went unanswered; voicemails were never returned.

Races without Flory turned into seasons of no Flory.

At some point a paddock story hardened into racetrack myth. Flory had decided his time as a race photographer was over and he needed to break himself from the track, the riders, the racing. Beyond simple self-exile, the story goes that John Flory pulled a Brett Weston. (Photographer Brett Weston is infamous for quitting the Nikon-life by dragging his negatives and slides into the yard, dousing them in gas, and striking a match.)

Call it artistic suicide.

Another version has Flory heaving file cabinets stuffed with negatives into a moving dumpster, then walking into another life. No one has offered verifiable information on Flory in decades, and the folks who claim to be in touch with him feel a lot like that one ex-AMA president who called himself a decorated Vietnam combat vet—until it came out he never even served.

Why such a dramatic move? For some, the paddock’s a drug, and the only way to quit is cold turkey—with matches. Truth be told, Flory wouldn’t be the first race photographer to torch a negative stash or a backup drive. To illustrate the point: when Troy Bayliss accepted Ducati’s post-retirement offer to do a little MotoGP development riding, it wasn’t for glory or money; it was, as he put it, “to stick the needle in my arm again.” And, after he retired, 1993 world champion Kevin Schwantz forced himself to stay away from motorcycles and racing. He raced cars, built houses he’d never live in, dated women who were probably bad for him—all to distract himself from the one thing that had driven him his entire life—winning. He knew that if he let that drug back into his system while he could still win, it would never end.

But, hey, John, if you're still out there superbikeplanet@gmail.com. I still have a few of your Mosport WSBK slides ...