Meaning
A result so close that only a photograph of the finishing line can settle it - and, by extension, any contest, election, or tender decided by the narrowest of margins. The phrase carries the drama of the stewards leaning over the strip of film while the crowd waits. Strictly, a photo finish requires a photograph; loosely, any close result will do, especially in headlines. Regional use: General English (horse-racing origin).
Origin
Born of the camera, and of betting's need for certainty. The oldest known race-track photo-finish images are single exposures made by John Charles Hemment in 1890, and Olympic athletics used a camera as early as Stockholm in 1912, but motion-picture frames were too slow to catch the decisive instant. The breakthrough was the strip camera, film drawn past a slit aligned with the winning post at roughly the horses' speed: Lorenzo Del Riccio, a Paramount engineer, refined it as the Photo-Chart, first used by the Del Mar Turf Club at its inaugural 1937 meeting, and the devices spread through the 1940s and 1950s as racing regulators fought corruption amid rising betting volumes. Collins dates the word itself to 1935-40, exactly the era in which the strip camera made the photograph the sport's final authority, and the idiom long ago escaped the track: any close contest is now a photo finish, however few cameras attend it.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- a photo-finish election
- down to a photo finish
- won in a photo finish
Usage Examples
- The two scullers hit the line together and the regatta came down to a photo finish the judges studied for four minutes.
- With 96 per cent counted, the mayoral race was declared a photo finish and both camps booked hotel ballrooms.
- The tender was decided by a photo finish of decimal points, and the losing consortium asked for the film, metaphorically speaking, to be developed again.