Surveillance, Survivors and Drinking Yourself Sober …
It all started with a competition and not being able to get into a party at the Oxford Union.
Dafydd Jones started getting serious about photography when studying Fine Art at Winchester Art College. Interested enough that he found himself photographing for the Sunday Times. They were running a competition for young photographers to capture Oxford students for an upcoming article The Return of the Bright Young Things.
Great Britain was in its second year of Thatcherism and it had been marked by a swift shift amongst the students at Oxford, a shift away from the hippy student look of the sixties and seventies, the long-haired Renaissance Man was out and aristocratic debauchery, formal attire and black-tie dinners were in. More Bullingdon Club, less Bohemian ...
Dafydd headed for the Oxford Union and found that he couldn’t get in … undeterred he decided to photograph outside …
And being on the outside ended up being a bit of a niche that Dafydd inhabited well. In fact, his first paid commission, from Tatler magazine, wasn’t to photograph Diana Spencer, but rather, the press pack that were following her.
Despite a stint in New York, it was the survivors of the Oxford and Cambridge Balls, that provided Dafydd with his most memorable material, those that were still around as the sun was rising the following morning … the comatose, the delirious, those that had drunk themselves sober …
Dafydd favoured recording film, the kind used in surveillance operations, pushed to 3200 ASA, no need to draw attention to himself with a flash gun … just quietly inhabiting that outside space and delivering delicious images of drunken debauchery.
Hope to see you at the next talk ...
