Ballroom Spy - Jeanette Jones

Introduction Jeanette Jones came to photography relatively late in life having been for many years a wife and mother, leading a happy but unexceptional life. It was when her children had grown up that her thoughts turned to how best to fill her newly found free time.

A birthday gift of a camera from her husband inspired Jeanette to take night classes in photography and she embarked on a journey she assumed would be no more than a hobby. She struggled during the first term, often coming close to giving up but it was whilst on holiday in Spain that she first applied her new found skills and discovered that she had a natural facility and talent.

A naturally charming woman, Jeanette soon discovered she had the ability to win over the confidence of her subjects and was allowed to take shots that captured intimate moments, in every sense, in the diverse lives of the people whom she met. Fascinated by worlds that present one vision to the public with another underworld to be discovered behind the scenes, she found her next subject to explore following a visit to Madame Jo Jo’s, the infamous Soho club. A year exploring the world of drag queens produced a stunning collection of photographs which were published, to great acclaim, in the book Walk on the Wild Side (Souvenir Press).

Now Jones has turned her lens upon quite different subject-matter. A keen and accomplished dancer herself, she decided to turn her attention to the world of ballroom dancing and her visits as a spectator to ballroom-dancing championships in Blackpool and the Royal Albert Hall, confirmed that she had found a wealth of material.

Her ballroom work represents a departure for Jones. Instead of coaxing, and cajoling her models to pose, she snapped them as she found them, followed them to costume fittings and into changing-rooms, trespassed on to the dance floor as they went whirling by. An instinct for a split-second moment produces something poignant and peculiarly lovely – not just cliché images of confected glamour, but sweat and toil and emotion. The diminutive woman with the camera, with her deceptively unassuming manner, has got to the very core of this world, where many bigger, brasher, starrier photographers could never hope to do.

In an interview that dates back to the late ‘90’s are about her work and her instinct for subjects, Jeanette made a prescient comment: “When I pick a subject or photograph something, then it becomes fashionable. This happened with my studies of male models and then my drag queens and you’ll find it will be dance next. I can see dance becoming very, very fashionable. You wait and see what’s going to happen with dance.”

The Ballroom Spy is the biggest exhibition to date of Jeanette Jones’ ballroom dancing photographs and we are privileged to be premiering the exhibition at Heartbreak before the show transfers to the Royal West of England Academy in Bristol in July.