Eyes Wide Open.
By Craig Brown

Sunday Telegraph magazine. 16 June 2002

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For 20 years a taciturn Welshman- the sort of person of whom, after the
cataclysm, neighbours struggle to recall anything beyond a vague memory that
he kept himself to himself‚ › has been gazing long and hard at partygoers,
before shooting them over and over again.

I first came across Dafydd Jones when the two of us worked on Tatler
magazine in the early 1980s. Every evening he would attend some high-society
do or other, snapping invisibly away at the great and the good as they
greeted one another with gestures of mutual celebration. Every morning he
would slide into the office armed with contact prints of this world
refracted through his ice-cool vision. Frozen in a flashlight and silenced
with a click, the great and the good assumed the appearance of those
meticulously stuffed-and-dressed animals in a museum of curiosities.
People often wonder why the Spanish Royal Family were so eager to have
their portraits painted by Veláquez when they must have known they would
emerge looking ill at ease and spineless. I often asked myself the same
question of Dafydd Jones. His eye was like a magnetic field for incaution,
ready to capture the exact nanosecond when the finger strayed into the nose,
the tongue poked its way into the ear, or the splash of champagne
illuminated the aristocratic nipple through the expensive chiffon. Yet
somehow he would always be invited back, ready to record new embarrassments
afresh.

For Dafydd Jones, now freelance, vanity never goes unpunished. Looking
myself up on dafjones.com, his eerily encyclopaedic website (he has snapped
1,200 rolls of film a year, 36 pictures of film per roll, for more than 20
years), I was confronted by a picture of myself leaning against a door at a
party in 1992. Alongside it were these two keywords for related searches:
balding, unkempt. I clicked on balding‚ and came up with a photograph of
Andrew Neil embracing Harold Evans at a party at Daphne‚s in Draycott Avenue
on 28 October 1996. Alongside the two famous editors was a list of further
keywords: ageing, Andrew Neil, bald patch, balding, editors, embrace, hair
loss, hand, Harry Evans, bald, Evans, hair, Harry loss, Neil, patch.
Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return. Jones
inherits his preoccupations from previous chroniclers of the social
zeitgeist. There is something of Hogarth in him, and perhaps a little of
Bosch. His is a puritanical vision parachuted into a sybaritic society, and
his talent is ignited by the clash, Within the realm of photography, he is,
if you will, an English Diane Arbus, but with the humanising addition of
a sense of humour. Like Arbus, he observes people as they struggle to forget
themselves in the social fandango. The two of them also share a creepy
fascination with masks.

But unlike Arbus, Dafydd Jones can smile. Many of his best photographs
strike me as very, very funny: Lucien Freud, trotting along glass in hand,
one eye fiercely closed, the other fiercely open, looking eerily like
Francis Bacon‚s Pope Innocent on the razzle; Nigella Lawson in 1981 playing
croquet from a sedan choir borne by young acolytes; Simon Heffer, the
red-headed Conservative commentator, standing stock-still and pallid as a
waxwork, his features embalmed in disapproval, at a party for New Labour as
a waiter bearing bottles of Budweiser attempts to squeeze his way past.

The big parties in the 1980s were still largely posh, black-tied, private
affairs. The big parties of the new millennium are promotional, cosmopolitan
and fuelled by the promise of fame. Jones has brilliantly adapted his art to
mirror the times, switching from claustrophobic black-and-white close-ups of
the private, enclosed world of inherited privilege to vast full-colour
time-lapse panoramas of the new world order of celebrity and its
multifarious hangers-on, all desperate for a sup of trickle-down.
It is a world for which Princess Anne must learn to struggle with Jordan for
column inches, and the Queen herself is forced to tolerate the presence of
Brian May playing his electric guitar on her roof. It is a topsy-turvy
world, a world of noisy desperation, a world that might have been expressly
designed for the beady amusement of the quiet Welshman who is busy clicking
away ever so discreetly in its corner.
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