Although I have been Martin Parr enthusiast for a long time, until recently I hadn’t come across Tony Ray-Jones, who Parr acknowledges as one of his most important influences. In his biography on British Photography Ray-Jones’ work is described as a personalised blend of ‘compassion, curiosity and irony.’ He said of his own work;
I have tried to show the sadness and the humour in a gentle madness that prevails in a people. The situations are sometimes ambiguous and unreal, and the juxtaposition of elements seemingly unrelated, and the people are real. This, I hope helps to create a feeling of fantasy. Photography can be a mirror and reflect life as it is, but I also think that perhaps it is possible to walk, like Alice, though a Looking-Glass, and find another kind of world with the camera.
Ray-Jones (1941-72) was the son of painter and etcher Raymond Ray-Jones and studied graphic design at the London School of Printing and subsequently won a two-year scholarship to Yale University School of Art. There he came under the influence of Alexey Brodovitch who is best known for his 24-year tenure (1934-58) as art director of Harper’s Bazaar. At Harper’s, Brodovitch promoted a strongly European influenced, graphic and close-cropped image driven style that defined fashion magazines of the period;
Through Brodovitch’s Design Laboratory, Ray-Jones befriended street photographer Joel Meyerowitz and together they took to the streets of New York, including Harlem, where Jones lived for a time. His sense of line and form, perhaps derived from his training (something which used to annoy him intensely, according to Meyerowitz), is a feature of Ray-Jones’ US pictures and, perhaps under Meyerowitz’ influence, so also is his use of colour;
New York, May 1963
Easter Parade, New York, 1964
Ray-Jones travelled extensively in the US, shooting in Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco and elsewhere. These experiences exposed Ray-Jones to both the hard lines that divided people in ‘classless’ America and to the dynamics of a frontier culture that believed anything was possible; the latter perhaps suiting Ray-Jones’ ‘no-nonsense’ personal style.
Not surprisingly, there are explicit references to Frank’s The Americans in Ray-Jones’ work during this period – but without the nastiness, greed and despair;
Ray-Jones: New York (undated but between 1962-65)
Frank: New Orleans 1955-1956
Ray-Jones returned to England in 1966. Here, prompted by a book, ‘The Country Life Book of Old English Customs’, he travelled the country in a VW camper van for the next two years, capturing the British at leisure; on holiday in seaside towns, attending beauty contests, dog shows, horse racing, the opera, school open days, miners’ galas and other public/ social events. In the October 1968 issue of Creative Camera magazine, he described what he was trying to achieve;
My aim is to communicate something of the spirit and the mentality of the English, their habits and their way of life, the ironies that exist in the way they do things, partly through their traditions and partly through the nature of their environment and their mentality. For me there is something very special about the English ‘way of life’ and I wish to record it from my particular point of view before it becomes Americanised and disappears.
Some of his best-known images are of the British ‘by the sea’. Although the railways had opened up the possibility of the seaside holiday to British workers in the 19th century, the right to paid holidays arose only with the passing of the Holidays with Pay Act in 1938. With the intervention of the Second World War, the real boom in seaside holidays had to wait until the 1950’s. People had not had the opportunity for leisure for a long time; life continued to be hard for most people and the annual week at the seaside was often the only opportunity for workers to escape.
According to his wife, “Tony was moved by that, by this taking of small pleasures, of people enjoying themselves knowing they were going back to the bloody awful grind for the rest of the year.”
His compassion, his engagement and his sense of humour are close to the surface of many of his pictures;
Brighton Beach, 1966
Broadstairs, 1968
Blackpool, 1968
Although few of us are actively aware of the change processes of which we are a part, he detected the awakenings of the permissive society, sometimes in the background, and sometimes as he, and others, looked on directly;
Margate, 1968
Ramsgate, 1968
Ray-Jones is at his strongest as he captures those unique, Bresson moments; those small mini-dramas that constitute daily life:
Beauty Contest, Scarborough 1968
Some of these mini-dramas are positively surreal;
Bognor Regis, 1967
Elderly woman eating pie seated in a piershelter next to a stuffed bear, 1969.
Ray-Jones was not a working class photographer; his observations of the British extended to Crufts, Eton and Glyndbourne. The same motifs are there, the gentleness, the domestic drama and, in the background, the gathering pace of a new set of social relations;
Glyndebourne, 1967
Eton, 1967
Parents Day, Eton, 1967
Ray-Jones most often used a manual Leica M camera and black-and-white film, often shooting from eye level with a wide-angle lens. However, according to his wife, he took many of his shots covertly;
He had a ratty old raincoat he used to call his “flasher’s raincoat.” He would hide the camera inside, open the coat and click. He was very good at being invisible in that regard.
Ray-Jones returned to the US in 1971 and was diagnosed with leukaemia in 1972. Three days after returning to England for treatment, Tony Ray-Jones died on the 13th March, aged thirty-one.
Ray-Jones’ images of the British at play were published posthumously in 1974 under the title, A day off: an English Journal. In the introduction to the book, Ainslie Ellis wrote;
[Jones] documented in an unaffected and straightforward manner the often unconscious humour of the English talent for playing life so seriously in its lighter moments. He caught the fun, the pathos, and the irony of England right through the stratification of social differences.
Tony Ray-Jones’ work in the UK is animated through this creation of an imagined, but not imaginary world, rather than through the literal rendering of the plain image. As a documentary photographer, it has been said that he made pictures rather than recorded facts (Walker, 2007).
Ray-Jones’ formative experience in the USA, which had exposed him to an entirely different aesthetic than had characterised British (documentary) photography up to the mid 1960’s, allowed him sufficient distance from his subjects to reveal his sense of humour and for there to be irony (and sadness and drama) but not so much as to remove him from his observations of the rapidly changing social processes and structures of post-War Britain
Unlike Ian Macdonald and Huw Alden Davies, Ray-Jones’ canvas was wider and his relationship with his subjects was less substantial or enduring. His work may have been less obviously ‘socially engaged’ in the way that much later documentary photography has become but the absence of hand-wringing does not make his images less of an attempt at interpretation or understanding. The ‘Britishness’ he describes may have changed (although his work is not an exercise in nostalgia) but Britishness still functions, politically and socially. Jones’ work is immediate, personal and emotionally intelligent. What this shows to me is that the ‘moment’ is what one is looking for as well as what one sees. I had a structure for my current project; an idea of what it was about. What I did not have until late on was an emotional engagement with it. It seems that Jones had that from the start – and he had the conviction and the energy to want to see it through. He also had, or developed, a wider view of what his subject was – it was much larger than the individual images. In his case it was a changing British social landscape. I could have taken much more of a sense of this into my project and been aware that the nature of contemporary Welshness is the bigger story behind what is happening to Afon Lwyd.
Jones kept detailed notes on every shoot and offered this advice to himself;
He may well be my new favourite photographer.
References:
Ian Walker. So exotic, so homemade: Surrealism, Englishness and documentary photography (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 168.
Ainslie Ellis, ed. A day off: an English Journal by Tony Ray-Jones (London: Thames and Hudson, 1974), 14.
