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Press cutting:
published in the London Evening Standard. 11 October 1999.
Stars, Sloanes, Toffs and Mr Jones By Nick Foulkes
Already this year London has seen some remarkable parties including the
Versace party at Syon House and the Jade Jagger “do” that was
the de
facto launch of Ian Shrager’s St Martins Lane Hotel. More are sure
to
follow.
What we are witnessing is the final stage in the two-decade evolution
of London as one of the worlds party capitals. Twenty years ago, Britain
teetered on the brink of social meltdown. Back then we did not know how
things would turn out: London’s heyday had been the Swinging Sixties,
New York and Paris were the party cities.
At the dawn of the Eighties no one could have envisaged how it would
end up, but one man was on hand to record the unfolding festive
narrative.
Dafydd Jones is not the sort of man one notices in a crowded room. In
fact in a nearly empty room, he is virtually invisible: slight, dark
haired and well, rather Welsh looking. There is little that immediately
marks him out as a photographic chronicler of a gilded age.
Today, successful photographers are more important than most of the
people they photograph. Meet Juergen Teller and risk drowning in the
moody gritty current of cool that eddies and swirls around him. On the
party circuit an uber-paparazzi like Dave Benett is a de facto kitemark
of approval: his mere presence transforms the party into a social event.
While fashions darling, Mario Testino, is the man with the megawatt
smile and the one every model/celeb wants to be retouched by.
And then there is Dafydd: the man in the nondescript trousers , zip-up
cardi, and battered Leica on a string. He doesn’t look like the Cecil
Beaton of our times, but what Beaton did for the Thirties and Bailey for
the Sixties, Dafydd has done for the Eighties and Nineties.
I started going to parties at about the same time as Dafydd started
photographing them. Recently he presented me with a picture of man with
Struwelpeter hair, Hawaiian shirt, dinner jacket and chicken bone
necklace. It was, said Dafydd, a picture of me, he had taken at a hunt
ball in Eynsham in the early eighties. If he had such a silly picture
of
me, what else did he have? He explained in his quiet lilting Welsh
voice, that he didn’t exactly know, but Tatler for whom he had worked
through-out the 1980s had returned his back catalog so the chances were
that, yes, he could have one or two amusing images.
There is something winning about Dafydd’s talent for understatement.
My
favorites shows a girl being pushed into a pool by an archetypal hooray
in a dinner jacket. You can almost hear them braying “stach farn”.
Grandson of a welsh miner, Dafydd spent most of the mid-Seventies at
Winchester School of Art, where he had spent most of his time painting
panoramic pictures, and taking photographs. It was on an art- school
trip to Florence that he began to experiment with ‘false attachment’.
He explains. “There was that statue of David in the distance with
a
Fiat in front and I photographed it to make it seem that the statue was
sitting on the roof of the car. You could make jokes in pictures, which
at the time I thought would be silly to do in painting.”
His tutors did not get the joke. He got a lower second and a job and
Butlin’s holiday camp in Minhead as a photographer. “Actually,
it was
really good fun, and I got paid quite well for taking photos of people,”
says Dafydd. “They also gave you a rudimentary training: having been
to
art school I wasn’t trained at all.”
After recording the lovely legs and knobbly knees at Minehead, he took
a studio in Jericho, a bohemian suburb of Oxford, alternating between
theatrical portraits of students and a photo-love-style illustrative
work for a series of English Language textbooks published by the OUP.
It was while in Oxford that he came second in a photo-jounalism
competition organized by the Sunday Times. “I did a set of six pictures
of Oxford dining clubs that some described as looking like something out
of pre-Nazi Germany. They were a parody of what used to appear in the
Tatler at the time. To me they were showing what the parties were like,
which was quite drunken.”
“The guy who won looked like a Sunday Time photographer who had been
sent on a job: they were quite flattering portraits of people in Oxford,
mine were more stylized and they did look more degenerate.”
The Oxford Dafydd knew was populated bye Nicky Sulmna, Nigella Lawson
“she was working as a waitress,” Hugh Grant, Jonathan Burham
“who now
works for Tina Brown’s Talk magazine”, Roddy Campbell “who
is married to
Sophie Hicks” and Rupert Soames.
At the time Brideshead was on television, the Sloane Ranger Handbook
was in every loo and old Etonians were putting peroxide in their hair
and behaving badly.
“It gave me the opposite of the taste for it,” says Dafydd of
his
Hogarthian chronicle of Oxford dining clubs and it was probably this
sense of disaffection that appealed to Tina Brown. “She rang and
sort of
said that if I moved to London, she would give me the job.”
That was 1981 and he has worked on and off for Brown ever since. One of
the infuriating things about Dafydd is a deadpan way of describing
things that might be described as anti-hype. Working for the Tatler in
1981 was the equivalent of being a member of Andy Warhol’s factory:
it
was full of bright young things including Nicholas Coleridge, Alexandra
Shulman and Michael Roberts. Anyone else would glamorize it shamelessly:
high-jinks, Wildean bons mots, daring fly-in-the-face-of
convention-by-the-seat-of-the-pants journalism.
For Dafydd, however, it was rather like Butlin’s at Minehead: “quite
good fun”, even if he had to remind Tina to pay him on time.
For almost 10 years he worked at Tatler while it, and the world it
recorded, under-went seismic change. When he started on Tatler, parties
in England were still private rather than corporate affairs. “Once
in a
while you had Liz Brewer organizing a shop opening, but PR parties were
pretty unheard of.”
What was wanted for the magazine were extraordinary pictures of
ordinary , everyday upper-class life. A typical one that Dafydd
describes has Bill Shand Kydd dressed as a fairy, sitting on the back
of
a horse at a British Field Sports Society midnight steeple chase. Dafydd
was responsible for such enduring images as young snoggers at the
Feathers Ball and pretty girls asleep on the lawn of Trinity College
Cambridge during a Mall Ball: young glamour at its most vacuous and
vulnerable, all Silk Cut cigarettes and sparkling wine.
He was expected to go to extreme lengths to get pictures. For instance
during the late Marquess of Bristol’s wedding, he was locked up in
the
apartments when the marquess had a psychotic turn and instructed his
henchman to prevent Dafydd from leaving with his pictures.
“He said he would only let me go if I signed a document giving him
a
copyright of the pictures, but we ran them anyway and when I met him a
month of two later he had calmed down.”
“We used to cover point-to-points, weddings and balls in Scotland
and
about the most commercial we would get was photographing the Dangerous
Sports Club diving into ice buckets from the bar in their hotel in St
Moritz.” He left when Tatler started printing lots of pictures of
people
smiling “which I find very unattractive” and went to New York
where Tina
Brown was editing Vanity Fair, described, by Dafydd, with masterful
understatement, as the ‘same sort of idea” as the Tatler he
had worked
for at the beginning of the Eighties. Except that this time the people
he photographed tended to be older, better behaved and richer, much,
much, richer.
This period was one of wanton extravagance, Dafydd remembers covering
a
party on Long Island for Saul Steinberg, who had a mock French chateau
built on his tennis courts and then filled it with tabeaix vivants of
famous old masters.
“They were not people anyone in England would have heard of at that
time, they were just very, very rich.”
At a time when conspicuous consumption and naked greed were the twin
pillars of American society, he was able to capture such images such as
the lapdogs of two of New York’s social x-rays, Brooke Astorn and
Iris
Love, fighting over canapes. The Nineties saw him shuttling back and
forth across the Atlantic, disrupting the life of his wife and two
children. Once magazine asked him to document life back-stage at the
couture shows in Paris (a commission unheard of at the time). “It
was
the beginning of the super model thing,” says Dafydd.
The magazine folded, but the editor Graydopn Carter (now editor of
Vanity Fair) offered him a job on the New York Observer, “a pleasant
relief from going to parties”.
However, before long he was back Vanity Fair, and found himself
notching up a half dozen Oscar parties.
“This was the mid-Nineties when parties were getting more dominated
by
Publicists are more people were trying to cover them, so that is partly
why I came back to London.”
He now works for Tina Brown’s Talk, for whom he spent part of this
summer boarding people’s yachts in the south of France, and
experimenting with panoramic photographs and his web site.
Dafydd still does the occasional bash- “the Versace party in London
had
a quite amazing mixture of people: Prince Charles, Jon Bon Jovi and
Donatella”- but he doesn’t miss the big Oscar parties.
“It has become this huge institution people fight to get in,”
he says.
More ingenious, however, was the plan of one squad of gatecrashers who,
in the year that Babe was released, presented themselves at the entrance
carrying a small pig on a leash, no one thought to question their
credentials.
“I have done the Oscars six times photographing Leonardo DiCaprio,
Sharon Stone, Tom Cruise, Liam Neeson and Ralph Fiennes ignoring Alex
Kingston, Madonna and Tony Curtis ignoring Mick Jagger...whoever the big
stars are that year.”
In that statement Dafydd seems to capture it all. For him stars are
like fashions, they change every year.
