Dafydd Jones' Press Clippings

Press cutting:
published in the London Evening Standard. 11 October 1999.
Stars, Sloanes, Toffs and Mr Jones By Nick Foulkes

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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.

Press cutting: Published in Modern Photography 1989.

A British photographer hunts the rich on the wing
by Judith Newman

If you want to know what God thinks of money,’’ Dorothy Parker once said,’’just look at the people he gave it to.’’
Few have looked as piercingly as the British society photographer Dafydd Jones. Every night Jones; camera testifies to the drama and, well, the silliness of the British social arena, where the upper echelons do what they do best - keep the rest of the world at bay.
Jones does not strive for postcard perfect poses of the gentry at play-those graceful shots of princess Diana with her brood tow-headed heirs. Such mythologizing is for Ralph Lauren ads and Lord Lichfield, the Queen’s cousin and unofficial court phographer. No, this grandson of a Welsh coal miner snaps the aristos with thier pants figuratively, and sometimes literally, down. And, cricky, they love it.
‘’The English have a sense of humor about themselves’’ says Jones, whose caught-on -the-wingwork appears regularly in the social arbiters Tatler and Harpers & Queen and has been copiedby such American magazines as Vanity fair, W and Spy. ‘’They see these pictures as caricatures that capture something about them.” Indeed, Jones’ work is more in line with the satiric illustrations of William Hogarth and spy, than the society photographs of Cocil Beaton and Bill Brandt.
What Jones often captures is that rare moment of utter unself-consciousness in people trained never to let thier guard down. It is often not a pretty sight, but he says, “I’ve never had anyone tell me they were offended by my work. In fact, some of the people who’ve had the most unflattering photos published then ask me to do their daughters’ weddings.’’
Jones speaks haltingly, his voice barely above a whisper. Dressed for lunch in khakis and chamois shirt, he looks like a graduate student younger than his 30 years. We chat in a toney French restaurant - Too toney perhaps for even a successful freelancer, who has the support of a wife and two children, to have chosen.
At Jones’ insistence his friend David Kirke, a writer and self-proclaimed adventurer joins in. Kirke is the founder of the Dangerous Sports Club, a group of Oxford and Cambridge bloods who invent thier own ‘’sports.’’ ‘’We catapault ourselves off cranes, jump off bridges attached to bungies (elastic straps), that sort of thing.’’
It’s soon clear why Kirke is along, Jones hates to explain his work, something the voluble daredevil is the only to happy to do for him.
‘’Lady Melchett called Dafydd ‘The Invisible Man,’’ says Kirke. ‘’He just blends in with the scenery.’’
‘’I just try to wear whatever everyone else is wearing,’’ adds Jones. ‘And I’m not loaded down with equipment, so i’m not too intrusive.’’
Less interested in gadgetry than in the final print, Jones generally works with one auto camera, an olympus 35 RC. Occasionally he’ll use a leica M4, ‘’which is useful because you can change the lenses, which you can’t do with the Olympus.” He has used the most basic point-and-shoots (including a Kodak Instamatic), but thinks they’re generally too slow for this kind of work.
Jones shoots five or six rolls of Tri-X a night- and claims to take only one or two pictures a month that have any artistic merit. He’s used the Kodak film since he started photography eight years ago. “I tried T-max, but i just didn’t like it. And besides, Tri-X is cheaper.” Jones developes his own negatives in Ilford ID 11, a solution he switched to after “Kodak changed the mix-up formula D76,” Jones rates his Tri-X at 400 when using a flash and at 1250 for indoor available-light shots. “i quite like Tri-X because you can up-rate (push it).’’ When he “up-rates” film Jones switches to Acufine developer.
For flash work Jones uses the compact Starblitz 2001, which he holds off camera, bouncing light off the ceiling.
“I don’t think it’s particularly important what kind of equipment you use,”he says. “There are cheap Russian cameras that are as good for my purposes.” When submitting work to a magazine, Jones will edit his contact sheets and send in only those shots he considers worthwhile. An assistant prints the pictures for him.
One of Jones’ most successful projects is a series of photographs of people asleep at parties. “I most enjoy taking pictures of people when they are completly unaware.’’ Dawn is the Invisible Man’s favorite time to shoot his subjects. “they are usually too spaced out to care that you are photographing them.”
The allure of Jones’ work goes beyond the aristocratic faces that appear in his pictures, but it’s appeal is still hard to define. Of course Kirke, whose admiration for Jones grows visibly in inverse proportion to the level of a second bottle of Bordeaux, wants very badly to try. “England is a place of mirrors, where everyone is trying to catch thier reflection in someone else. Dafydd’s work is about this process-about people watching other people watching them.” Jones, exercising his third Armagnac, knocksthe discourse down a couple of pegs. “I just snap it when it looks right,” he sighs.
Jones comes by his modesty honestly. He trained in fine arts at the fine arts at the Winchester School of Art, painting huge abstract oils. At 22, with paintings not exactly zipping out of his studio, he took a job as a strolling photographer at a holiday camp. (Holiday camps are peculiarly British institution. The nearest American equivilant would be a cross between Catskill’s resort and Camp Pendleton) It was while photographing contests for Mr Tarzans, Gorgeous Grandmas and lovely legs that Jones developed an abiding distaste for colour photography. “People only want to look at the pretty colours. It’s distracting, and usually takes away from the subject.”
After six months he moved to Oxford, where he begun photographing the rather festive goings-on at the University dining clubs. There’s an exuberance, lightly seasoned with desperation, in these early photos that would have done Scott Fitzcrald proud.
His Oxford pictures won second prize in a Times of London contest (first prize went to a man who now sells insurance, Jones says)and national attention. He’s not looked back.
Jones hopes he will not always be known as a society photographer. It seems strange to him that he, a quiet family man who never goes to parties on his own, has made his name chronicling the social steeplechase.
The check comes for lunch. the dare-devil Kirke does not hazard reaching for it. Jones picks it up and floats it casually in my direction. it totals nearly 100 newly resurgent pounds sterling. “I’m sure your magazine can take care of it,” he says smiling sweetly, dreamily. I am utterly disarmed. Of course, I pay.
The Invisible Man has struck again.