TONY RAY-JONES
TONY RAY-JONES
M A R T I N PA R R F O U N D AT I O N & R R B P H O T O B O O K S BRISTOL
Introduction In my photography career there have been many landmark moments and revelations. My grandfather lending me a camera, and going to Scarborough with him to shoot photos. Seeing copies of Creative Camera when Phil Reed, the art teacher at Surbiton Grammar School for Boys, subscribed to this important British photography magazine in the late 1960s. But perhaps the most influential moment of all was seeing the work of British photographer Tony Ray-Jones, shown to an eager group of first-years by Bill Jay in 1971, when I was a photography student at Manchester Polytechnic. Although Ray-Jones lived in the USA for much of the mid-1960s, his time in England between the years 1966 and 1969 produced many of his conic images. These had a profound impact on this young student. It was his ability to construct complex images, with everyone perfectly placed in the uniquely English atmosphere and surroundings, which struck a chord of recognition – and envy – in me. Ray-Jones’s skills were learnt from a generation of street photographers he had encountered in New York in the mid-1960s. They were all associated with the Brodovitch circle, a group of photographers that this legendary designer led and nurtured. The group included Garry Winogrand, Joel Meyerowitz and many other photographers who would later go on to define this particular generation. Their ability to use the street as the backdrop to seek out their own personal
dramas was key to the language that Ray-Jones acquired, and he was keen to return to England and apply this formula to a country that had never been photographed in this way before. I immediately recognised and was inspired by this new language that he had applied so successfully, and also admired the work of his peers in New York. But the magic of some of Ray-Jones’s iconic images with their quirky English observations – especially at the seaside – most enthralled and excited me. It is quite significant that the beach became the most important feature of Ray-Jones’s subject matter, for it is very similar to the New York street, where personal dramas can be explored and constructed. The streets of New York were very American and the beach peculiarly British. You can imagine my shock when on reading a copy of Photo News Weekly in 1972 I learned that Tony Ray-Jones had died of leukaemia. I could hardly believe it. I had no idea that he was ill. I recall buying A Day Off, a book of Ray-Jones’s English photos, the day it was published two years after his death. Now I was able to view the images that had struck such a chord. A year later I moved to Hebden Bridge and started shooting the local community there, over a period of five years. These images now make up the Non-Conformists
work, which was shown with the Ray-Jones work in Media Space in 2013. I also utilised the lessons learnt with my own projects Beauty Spots and the black-and-white work I produced in Ireland in the early 1980’s – my final major body in monochrome. Another ten years after Ray-Jones’s death I too took to the beach as a central subject matter, but this time in colour, and using flash. This method of shooting with the palette of commercial photography always hovering in the background, but still with the ability to construct the personal dramas, was inherited from the same school of photography of which Ray-Jones was a leading character. In the intervening years, I have continued to enjoy the work of Ray-Jones. He has the ability to make very complex images, where every element falls into place. The gaps between the components of the image have as big a role to play as the main subject matter itself. He often pushes the subject to the edge of the frame to establish a dis-balance that works perfectly. Sometimes I mull over what would have happened had Ray-Jones lived. I am sure we would have met and become friends. His charming stubbornness and intolerance of mediocrity would surely be most engaging. I feel he could have so easily drifted into being a film-maker, with his astute respect for film. Who knows if he would have continued shooting and expanding his archive of English photos? This book for me has signalled some kind of closure of my relationship with Tony Ray-Jones. I have soaked up what was there to learn, fully digested his remarkable eye and vision, and now offer these new photos for other people to share and appreciate, to complement the iconic images we all know and love.
Martin Parr
T
ony Ray-Jones was born in June 1941 and died in March 1972 – the arithmetic alone makes it remarkable that his small but distinctive body of photographs, created in less than a decade, lives on as a significant marker in the history of British photography. It is part of the evolutionary shift that took place during the 1960s and 1970s as magazine journalism declined as a source of revenue and photographers began to look for new outlets and new markets. After his death Ray-Jones would became something of a poster boy for the new “Independent British photography” movement, which placed personal artistic vision above commercial success. For any photographer to establish an individual personal style is paramount, but the somewhat pious distinction between “personal” and “commercial” work is seldom a clear one and for Tony Ray-Jones, the lines between artist and journalist were similarly blurred. “Although one tries to be independent,” his friend the American photographer John Benton-Harris said to me when I asked him about that time, “it’s very difficult to be independent in a world that is motivated by money. You have to make a decision as to whether you’re going to be motivated by money or motivated by ideas[1].” And though Tony Ray-Jones’s most memorable photographs were made in Britain, and made about the British, what motivated him first and foremost was what he had discovered in America, where he lived and worked in his early twenties, between 1961 and 1965. He had arrived in New York as a new spirit in photography was starting to spread. Robert Frank, whose book The Americans had been published there only two years before, had made a very personal journey across his adopted country, and his glancing, sceptical travelling eye had betrayed a disillusionment with the image of a “free” liberal America. A new kind of photographic expressionism, based more on personal observation than the demands of narrative or news, was in the vanguard, and the shift was explained by the curator John Szarkowski, whose exhibition, New Documents, at the Museum of Modern Art in 1967, introduced
the work of Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander to the American public. What motivated these photographers, he explained, was something different from what drove Life magazine reporters, or photojournalists who believed their stories could right all wrongs. “Most of those who were called documentary photographers a generation ago, when the label was new,” he wrote, “made their pictures in the service of a social cause. It was their aim to show what was wrong with the world and to persuade their fellows to take action and make it right. “In the past decade a new generation of photographers has directed the documentary approach toward more personal ends. Their aim has been not to reform life, but to know it. Their work betrays a sympathy — almost an affection — for the imperfections and frailties of society. They like the real world, in spite of its terrors, as the source of all wonder and fascination and value — no less precious for being irrational[2].” A curiosity about the lives of ordinary people was what Tony Ray-Jones brought back to England with him and what informed his photography as he crossed the country – surely, consciously, like Frank – studying their leisure time and more arcane customs. In an echo of that sentiment, three years later he would write about his own pictures, “I have tried to show the sadness and humour in a gentle madness that prevails in people. The situations are sometimes ambiguous and unreal, and the juxtaposition of elements seemingly unrelated, and yet the people are real. This, I hope, helps to create a feeling of fantasy. Photography can be a mirror and reflect life as it is, but I also think that perhaps it is possible to walk, like Alice, through a looking glass, and find another kind of world with the camera[3].” He was born Holroyd Anthony Ray-Jones on 7 June, 1941 at Wookey Hole, near Wells in Somerset, the son of the artist Raymond Ray-Jones (18861942), who despite coming from a Lancashire working class family had won a scholarship to the Royal College of Art in 1907 (he later changed
his name from Raymond Jones, to Raymond Ray-Jones, feeling it was more suitable for an artist). His mother was Effie Pearce, the daughter of J.W.E. Pearce, a classical scholar and head of a private boarding school in Sidcup. It was Effie’s brother, Edward Pearce (later Baron Pearce and head of the Law Commission), who commissioned Ray-Jones to make portraits of his parents. According to Philip Ray-Jones, one of the photographer’s two older brothers, their mother had been in love with a young doctor who had asked her parents for her hand in marriage and been refused. So Raymond Ray-Jones was perhaps introduced as an alternative[4]. They married in 1926, and their first child, Alan, was born in 1930, followed by Philip in 1933. Despite some early success, Ray-Jones never managed to make a decent living to support his family. His primary skill was as an etcher (he was a member of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers and exhibited regularly at the Royal Academy), and the demand for portraits and architectural etchings had been in decline since the mid-1920s and he, according to the art historian David Tovey, who compiled a history of Ray-Jones for the online magazine, The Siren, found painting much more difficult to master. Tovey also suggests that Ray-Jones suffered from some kind of nervous complaint or depression[5]. In 1933, the family moved to Corbis Bay near St Ives in Cornwall. If offered them a community of artists, cheaper living and a good place to bring up their children. During their time there, Raymond Ray-Jones began to take photographs, as references for his drawings and paintings, but he may also, according to Tovey, have intended some of these photographs to stand on their own as works of art. By the late 1930s, he was spending periods of time working in Italy, living on next to nothing, sometimes having to be rescued by his wife. The outbreak of war put a stop to his travels. By the summer of 1941, when their third son, Anthony, was born, Raymond Ray-Jones was increasingly reclusive and in February 1942 he committed suicide. Alan was eleven, Philip, eight and Tony was
eight months old. While their mother sorted out their affairs, the two older boys were sent to boarding school and she moved with the baby to a house in Tunbridge Wells. In 1945 they moved again, to a bungalow in Little Baddow in Essex (which Philip thinks was owned by their grandmother and had been occupied by a tenant until then). Effie Ray-Jones worked as a physiotherapist in Oldchurch Hospital in Romford, and also received much-needed support from the Artists’ Orphans Fund. In 1948 they moved to London, to New End Square in Hampstead, “just four rooms, one on top of the other”, according to Philip. Tony was sent to Christ Church Primary and then, at nine, as a boarder to Christ’s Hospital, the independent charitable school in West Sussex. “Tony hated Christ’s Hospital,” Philip told me, mainly because of bullying and the assaults on him in the dormitory by senior boys. (Later, he never wanted to talk about his time there, though it has been referred to as analogous with George Orwell’s description of life at St Cyprian’s, his Sussex prep-school, which he wrote about in Such, Such Were the Joys.) Philip Ray-Jones tells a story that when his brother was living in New York in the early 1960s, he had recognised a boy he had been to school with: “Tony was on the subway in New York and he saw this boy sitting opposite, and he walked across and said ‘Are you Dickinson? And the boy said, ‘Yes. Who are you?’ And Tony said ‘It’s better you don’t know who I am.’” It was one of the boys who had bullied him. But he was also falling behind with his lessons. His wife, Anna Ray-Jones, wonders whether this was because he was deaf in one ear, a problem later treated successfully[6]. Whether or not, he left Christ’s Hospital at 16 with very few ‘O’ levels. (Philip says “one”, other accounts give the tally as five). In 1957 he was given place at the London School of Printing (later the London College of Printing now LCC, the London College of Communication), to study graphic design. It may have been, as Philip suggests, that a friend of his father’s helped Tony to get the place there. It was the
first undergraduate graphics course in the country and had been set up only three years earlier. Photography was included in the course, but at this point Ray-Jones was more interested in design. He had a camera, but it didn’t work properly. “He had this Rolleicord which he couldn’t cope with,” Philip remembered. “It took him a year before he realised it was the camera not him. It couldn’t focus. He got a replacement but he wouldn’t use it. I imagine he sold it. Then he got an Olympus Pen. That’s the camera I remember. It would go into his jacket pocket, so neat, and he enjoyed using it I think.” It was in his second year at LSP that he became more interested in photography. He went with a friend to see an exhibition at Regent Street Polytechnic. According to Philip, Tony looked at the photographs and said to the friend, “This is what I want to do, be a photojournalist[7].” One of his tutors at LSP was Rolf Brandt, the brother of the photographer Bill Brandt. “He sort of took Tony [under his wing],” Philip said, “and Tony did an extra year after the course finished, mainly photography with Rolf Brandt.” Both Brandts had been born in Hamburg but moved to London in the early 1930s.Rolf Brandt was a painter and a collagist heavily influenced by Dada and Surrealism. By the time Tony Ray-Jones was being taught by his brother, Bill Brandt had become the most famous “British” photographer of the 20th century (for a long time he concealed his German origins, claiming to have been born in South London). Brandt’s two pre-war books, The English at Home (1938) and A Night in London (1938), would be an important influence when Ray-Jones began to conceive his own book on the English[8]. While at LSP under Rolf Brandt’s tutelage, Ray-Jones made the most of living in London. He loved music. “Tony was into rock’n’roll, Bill Haley, people like that,” Philip said. “And then he moved to folk music. We both liked folk music, and at that point I think we connected.” At some point,
apparently, Ray-Jones even opened a coffee bar in Soho. “He and a friend from LSP each put in £5 each, and they had this basement in Monmouth Street. They bought a Cona coffee machine and served a few sandwiches. I went in there once. I think it was called The Cave.” History doesn’t record the Cave among its list of early Soho coffee bars but in 1958 or ’59, £10 pounds, the equivalent of about £250 today, might well have covered a couple of months’ rent for a basement, with enough left over for a coffee machine. Soho’s most famous folk club was Bunjies, in Litchfield Street off Charing Cross Road, and it’s hard to think Tony wouldn’t have gone there. He was an enthusiastic guitar player, and even took lessons from Robin Hall – half of the cheery Scottish folk duo Robin Hall and Jimmy MacGregor – for a time but as with many other enthusiasms, Philip said, he soon gave it up: “Six months later, guitar finished!” “My father was the same,” he said. “He’d spend a year on an etching, and then at the end of the year, if he didn’t like it, he’d just score it and that would be it. And Tony was a bit like that.” He would retain his love of music, though. Later he photographed several music-related magazine stories – jazz musicians in New Orleans, country musicians in Nashville, blues musicians in Oakland, California. He photographed the Isle of Wight Festival 1969 and the Bath Festival of Blues and Progressive Music in 1970. And among his unprinted contact sheets from America are pictures he took at the Newport Folk Festival in 1963 and 1964, where Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Joan Baez, Peter Paul and Mary and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott are all clearly identifiable[9]. When he finished his course at LSP he was considered promising enough to win a graduate scholarship to Yale. Yale, too, had only recently added a graphic design course – the first American university to do so — and retained close links with British art colleges. Derek Birdsall, who taught typography at LSP at the start of what would be a long and distinguished
career in book and magazine design, explained the importance of the Yale exchange. “Alan Fletcher [one of the founders of Pentagram] went to Yale and started the fashion. American advertising had become very influential, with people such as Saul Bass. And the Swiss, too. The English style was a synthesising of the Swiss with American style, they were melded together. Many graphic designers became photographers because, frankly, they thought they could take a better picture than a lot of commercial photographs around. The general level of photography was quite poor[10].” Alvin Eisenman, who founded the graphics course at Yale in 1951 and remained its director until 1990, died in 2013, but I spoke to him in 2004 and he remembered Tony Ray-Jones well. “He was an extraordinary person, and as a photographer. He was one of the high points of my time there. I enjoyed his company and his ideas very much. We had a selection of students from all over the world, that was the nature of the university, it wasn’t unusual. I had taught at the Royal College of Art in London during my time at Yale[11].” Eisenman stressed how important it had been to have photography included in the course. “When I started in 1950, I told them before I arrived that it was impossible to teach graphic design without including photography. We all felt the same. It was not possible not to have it.” The photographs Ray-Jones submitted for his application to Yale were nothing special, according to Philip. They’d been taken during a trip to North Africa, of a town that had been destroyed by an earthquake — “He lay in the back of a cab and stuck the camera up over the window without seeing what he was shooting … When he came back he developed three or four rolls, made big enlargements and stuck them down on mounts without cropping or editing. He sent the pictures off to Yale and they accepted him.” But when Ray-Jones got to America, it was a revelation. For somebody who had spent his childhood and adolescence navigating the traps and
snobberies of the English class system, it was liberating; stimulating, creative and diverse. And in the USA, particularly New York, graphic design, advertising and photography was in its heyday. There is little that remains of his first year work at Yale. There are some colour transparencies of buildings on the New Haven campus, which might have been studies for a design course. But though his archive in the Science and Media Museum in Bradford contains many pages of notes taken down from one lesson or another, most of them littered with additional short, pithy imperatives to himself, few are dated and it’s hard to distinguish what comes from where or when. What is certain is that in the summer of 1962, he took a year of absence from Yale and moved to New York. Partly it was a matter of money – he received a grant from Yale and a small bursary from the Artists’ General Benevolent Institution, but he was always short of money and he wanted to get a job. It must also have been because, three hours away from New Haven, New York City was where everything was happening. When he arrived – perhaps with help from his tutors – he found a job in the design department of Columbia Records on Madison Avenue. His job was designing company ads. “They did a catalogue a month,” said Philip, who had lived in New York for a period in 1963. “His ads really stand out from the page.” This explains why some of his notes are scribbled on pages torn from memo pads bearing the old CBS logo of the turntable in the frame with the name of an art director or designer printed above: Val Yochem, for example, designed album covers for CBS before going back to Ohio where she worked for the American Crayon Company[12]. Ray-Jones wasn’t the only nascent photographer taking a day job to get by. In 1962 Joel Meyerowitz, who would become one of Ray-Jones’s closest friends in New York, was working as an art director in an advertising agency. “We met in a lab on 56th street,” he said. “There were a lot of labs off Fifth Avenue because many advertising agencies and Columbia
Records were all up there. We were both picking up our film. Colour film. I was looking at my slides on a lightbox and this kid was standing next to me, and we both had beards and long hair and we were scruffy. So I was looking at my stuff and he was looking at his stuff and we were probably muttering aloud and then we started looking at each other’s stuff. And I said to him, ‘I have a projector. You want to come back and we can project these things instead of looking at them on the lightbox?’ So we went and we looked at some slides together and then we started hanging out together, and then we would go photographing together. As often as possible[13]. “We would go to these parades. Every Saturday there would be an ethnic parade: St Patrick’s Day, Polish Day, Columbus Day, Veterans’ Day... We would project the film at night and sit on each side of the projector. The images were two feet across and we would talk about how we’d messed up, how we should be closer… we were trying to create a language in which to discuss the pictures[14].” They also talked about the photographers they admired. “Bresson was very important to both of us,” Meyerowitz said. “Around 1963 my wife bought me a copy of The Decisive Moment. I think Tony had a little bit more knowledge of Cartier-Bresson’s work. Tony and I, we were in love with him. And with Robert Frank. The hardness and the demanding quality, the dark lyricism of Robert’s work—it seemed more modern, compared to the classicism of Bresson.” And then there was Garry Winogrand… “The freest, loosest, openended, open-hearted, generous pictures about life…” Meyerowitz rapturised. “Garry’s work was a blow between the eyes for both of us … When Tony went back to England, he took the cue from Garry and could reinvent himself. He learned how to manipulate a multiplicity of things in the frame at the same time.” During the 1950s and 1960s there seem to have been few photographers in New York who didn’t attend Alexey Brodovitch’s Design Labora-
tory, which in 1962 was held at Richard Avedon’s studio on 57th Street. Ray-Jones and Meyerowitz were no different. Brodovitch was a white Russian who had fled the revolution to become an artist in Paris. He had worked as a scene-painter for the Ballets Russes, and then as an illustrator and art director. In 1933 he was offered the post as head of the Advertising Design Department at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art and it was here that he set up his first laboratory offering students a chance to study every aspect of design. A year later, Carmel Snow, the newly arrived editor of Harper’s Bazaar, offered him a post as the magazine’s art director in New York, and he remained there for the next quarter century, making it the most visually innovative and influential magazine of the era. Brodovitch famously advocated “surprise” as a key element of design and he encouraged documentary photographers to take on fashion. in the 1940s and 1950s people such as Louis Faurer, Cartier-Bresson, Saul Leiter, Lisette Model and Robert Frank all worked for the magazine though few of them stayed attached for long. By the time Tony Ray-Jones joined the Design Laboratory, Brodovitch had left Bazaar; he was an alcoholic and a heavy smoker, was in and out of hospital and running out of cash. But a bond grew between the two of them that was both professional and personal. Ray-Jones assisted Brodovitch and would later help him map out the design of a new magazine, Sky, though it never got past maquette stage. When, in 1966, his health giving way, Brodovitch moved back to France to live nearer his brother’s family, Ray-Jones went out to visit him. Never having had a father himself, perhaps the older man offered a kind of surrogate. “Richard Avedon has assumed temporary command at the Alexey Brodovitch Design Lab” is scrawled across the top of one of Ray-Jones’s notes, followed by a list of potential assignments: “Halloween”, “Photomat”, “Portrait of oneself”, “Sex”, Death”. Down one side, some tips from Avedon: “Advised us to read Cyril Connolly” and “Photography seems to be a double-sided mirror to him. One side reflects the image of the subject, the other himself[15].”
On another three-page document headed “Visual Communication: Photography, Design” is partly distinguished by being neatly type-written. A researcher’s hand has speculated: “Perhaps extracts from Brod Class[16].” Whatever its source, it is as much about the psychological and mental approach to photography and design as to their technical and aesthetic demands. It begins: Teaching impossible. Learning difficult. Calculated risk. Think, work experiment. And at the end, scribbled by hand: Discover your own ABC/ Imitation is dishonest. Art Education dangerous –kills individuality and establishes a mould. Try Everything Learn by Mistakes
How much Ray-Jones took from this kind of thing is hard to tell. It seems to have been his habit to write everything down, as if trying to order his chaotic thoughts and din the instructions into his head. He was on a constant quest for self-improvement but very often it seems to have ended in failure. “Tony was an impulsive and often harshly self-critical person,” Joel Meyerowitz said. He was going through a hard struggle with himself.” When he found fault with his work, “He was capable of dumping it[17].” One of his other friends in New York was the Polish photographer Ryszard
Horowitz. He had immigrated to America in 1959 at the age of 20. During WW2 he and his family had been sent to Auschwitz and, only six years old when the war ended, he is one of the youngest camp survivors. Horowitz had studied painting in Krakow and was passionate about jazz, film and American photography. When he got to New York he entered Pratt, the leading school of art and design and was awarded an apprenticeship to work with Brodovitch. At the Design Laboratory in 1962 he met Tony Ray-Jones. “We were probably the only two Europeans there, so somehow we hit it off.,” Horowitz said. “We both loved jazz, and we found out that Americans of our age were mostly not into jazz, they were into the Beatles and rock and roll and Presley, and so we took advantage of the fact that some of the greatest geniuses of jazz were playing around to virtually empty clubs. You could spend all night listening to Monk or Jerry Mulligan and many other people; the Village Vanguard, the Village Gate, the Five Spot, Birdland… Yes, Miles Davis played at Birdland[18].” For a while the three of them hung out together. One day, Avedon took a picture of them fooling around in his studio, each dressed preppily and armed with a camera engaged in a mock fight. But when Horowitz started taking on advertising jobs, his two friends disapproved: “They were teasing me because they considered themselves to be great artists and I was not, because I was just doing advertising,” he said. “Tony was much more interested in reportage and photographing things around him.” Working as an art director got in the way of Ray-Jones’s photography. His instinct was to go for the maximum effect and he automatically visualised the picture laid out across a double-page spread. “I can tell you, from a thousand conversations, it was his blind spot,” Meyerowitz said. “He knew he was a good designer and he knew he was designing in the style of the times, but he was trying to rid himself of that, because it was way too easy. I would say, ‘You got too much red in this picture. You’ve filled the frame with a flag and it’s just one more of your design tricks that you’re trying to get away from’ because his knee-jerk [response] was
to make very design-oriented pictures, in which a lot of colour filled part of the frame, because that’s where he would put type. “Tony could go into a depression or into an anger or a hissy fit into no time at all,” Meyerowitz said. “He often felt that he was besieged by the powers that be. He would go into a funk, and he would get depressed and wander around like a cloud was over his head. He would mutter, ‘It’s no good, I can’t do this, gotta keep working, gotta go out every day…’. Probably if he was alive today it would have been that he was slightly bipolar. He worked out of a sense of frustration. “There’s a thing about those people who have brilliant creative minds and who died [young] – there was that sense with Tony – that the clock is running and they’re burning their metabolism at a certain rate. Tony was feverish about photography. But he was very English about it all, always muttering a lot. He was incredibly impatient[19].” In the autumn of 1963 Ray-Jones went back to Yale to finish his degree. That year he lived in the Dixwell area of New Haven, which had a big African-American community, and he photographed there intensively. He went into people’s homes, their churches, to their street parades; he took pictures inside their barbershops: men tipped back almost horizontal in their chairs, being lathered and shaved and pomaded. In one picture the young man in the foreground faces the photographer, his hair net over one his shoulder, his top knot in curlers. It was the sort of place where, in 1964, white photographers were not necessarily welcome, but according to Juan Gomez, a friend from Yale, he had an easy rapport with black people[20]. “He’d lived in Harlem for a time, on 126th Street,” Philip told me. “I think he found it quite difficult being a solitary white person. But it came out of a love for black people. That carried on all his life. Maybe it came from his love of music. I don’t know.” Once he had graduated he went back to New York and picked up work
as an art director and designer. Meyerowitz remembered him working on three magazines: Car and Driver, Opera News and Sky – the new magazine he was designing with Brodovitch, taking the layouts into hospital for his approval when necessary. “It was going to be a cross between Esquire and the New Yorker; literary standards-plus-photographs,” said Meyerowitz. “The editor was David McCullough. He’s, like, the dean of American biographers and history writers now. It was his conception and Tony was the art director and Heritage magazine was the publishing company. “Tony was giving out great assignments to a lot of serious photographers. He gave me an assignment from Sky. I went to Butte, Montana and I made a body of work inside the mines there, and I went with one of American’s greatest writers at the time, Nelson Algren, ‘the man with the golden arm’. I still have the original design of the magazine. We chose the best pictures, we gave it a lot of space…” But Sky never made it on to the newsstands. For the other magazines, though, Ray-Jones was at liberty to commission himself. Meyerowitz mimicked an exchange: “Tony Ray-Jones the art director turns to the Tony Ray-Jones the photographer [voice of authority]: ‘I think you should go to Daytona and shoot this.’ [submissive voice] ‘OK, you’re the boss. I’ll go.[21]’” At Car and Driver, he self-assigned himself the big stock car race meetings in Detroit and Daytona Beach, and judging from the boxes of colour transparencies in his archives he obviously went more than once. These cross-country journeys allowed him to stop off on the way. He had an idea to do a series on American cities which never came to fruition, but he took pictures in Detroit and Chicago – both times among the poor black communities where, though he was never a political photographer per se, his sympathies seemed to lie. “That’s one thing he liked about New York,” Philip said. “He could wander over to Avenue A, B or C and you could see the contrast between
the very wealthy and the poverty. You saw it all. And his politics were always with the poor people. He didn’t value money.” The downtown art scene was another draw. Between 1962 and 1964 Judson Dance Theater, an experimental group of performers and artists, held weekly workshops at the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village. This is where the choreographer Yvonne Rainer and the artist Robert Rauschenberg created works, and where some of the early “happenings” took place. In Ray-Jones’s archive is the programme of Stockhausen’s “Originale”, directed by Allan Kaprow, a pioneer of performance art, which premiered at the Judson Church in September 1964, part of the second New York festival of the avant-garde. And among his contact sheets are his photographs of the artist Carolee Schneemann’s famous performance piece, Meat Joy, which she described as “an erotic rite”. One of the last projects he planned in New York was to be a set of portraits of people who lived the Chelsea Hotel. Magazines such as Esquire, Harper’s Bazaar and Glamour were publishing portraits by Diana Arbus (her series of New York eccentrics had appeared in Esquire in 1961; Ray-Jones’s must have known it long before he embarked on his story about English eccentrics[22]), and it’s hardly surprising that the Chelsea offered itself as the framework for a feature. He’d jotted down a cast list[23]: AT THE CHELSEA On the top floor lives composer George Kleinsinger Mr Zolt (the clerk) Gypsy singer Larry Rivers Katherine Dunham. Dancer Virgil Thomson – Edwardian atmosphere (CHECK FULL ENTRY) Henri Cartier-Bresson Arthur Miller – Lives there in winter and Basset hound [CHECK FULL
Theodora Keogh (Novelist) and Tommy O’Toole (Tugboat captain) Laundry room Christo – French artist – makes movie Charles James – Couturier 6th floor – dress dummy Bob Ragland – Engineer electronic devices John Latham – English painter – Pop If it was intended as a saleable feature, he didn’t complete it. There is a rather lugubrious portrait of Virgil Thomson, settled into a well-upholstered armchair, his right index finger pointing mysteriously up to heaven, but it’s little more than a competent magazine portrait and has none of the life or the sense of enjoyment that infuses his street pictures. Time and again, after he returned to England, though he was eager to meet picture editors and art directors and take paid work, the photographs he took for features in the Sunday Times and Telegraph magazines or for the Radio Times rarely exhibit either the distinctive spatial choreography or the humour and pointed absurdity of his English work. By 1965 he was working without a visa and knew he would have to return to England, however much he would have liked to stay. “He didn’t want to go back,” Meyerowitz said. “He loved New York. He loved it. He was happier there than at any time in his life. He felt completely free and he loved the music scene, the whole nightlife, he was out and about all the time, we both were. It was a freedom from all of the restraints from the childhood he grew up in.” Once it was decided, however, he planned his return like a military operation. He was ready to take on a big personal photographic project. Whether – as is often speculated – he intended to make his own version of The Americans or not, he was certainly focused on the idea of putting together book about the English. And however much he brought his American experiences to bear upon it, he was returning to a country he
knew. Later he would reflect on the differences between the two countries. “I found America a very colour-conscious country,’ he said. “Colour is very much part of their culture, and they use it in crazy ways. You look down Madison Avenue at lunchtime and the colours just vibrate. When I got back to England I found everything so grey that I didn’t see the point of shooting colour… To me, Britain is a very black and white country[24].” Though he’d loved America, by comparison that love affair had been a too-brief reading of the country, whereas now he was ready to look deeper into his own. He wanted a project that would express his personal view of the place and its people, and that tested his personal powers as a photographer: could he get across in the pictures what he wanted to say? By August, he had worked out the practical logistics. To a document headed “PLAN” he added an immediate caveat. “Approximate plan subject to change[25].” August 5th 65 Establish American rep or agency Let English mags know of, and U.S (with ideas and European trip) DEC: Return to Britain Dec either before or after Christmas Day spend 3 weeks-month in Britain/get drivers licence Jan 66 Take trip around Europe to see and get work…. And so on. He aimed to “get apartment with lease and sub-lease clause, work for National Geographic if possible, take short trips around Britain and to France and Spain.” The apartment could be outside London – Brighton or Bath – “should be able to entertain there”. Finally, by June and July: “Start shooting on English Book[26].” “I picked him up from London airport in 1965,” said Philip.” And we drove down Oxford Street and he said, “Look at those tiny buildings. Aren’t they small!”
At first the two brothers shared a flat. “We moved to a cousin’s flat in Sloane Square, top floor, and we lived there for some time. Tony was doing a lot of photography then. He was looking for [magazine] stories that would help him with the book.” He was also planning his travel itinerary for the coming summer. In the spring of 1966 he went to Ireland with friends from America, the Irish photographer Alen MacWeeney and his wife Artelia Court, who had brought with her a book that had just been published in America, but not yet in Britain: “Old English Customs” by Roy Christian. She showed it to Ray-Jones and watched his reaction: “It was as if this conversation about the value of custom – what it is, how to recognise it, and its relation to national identity – gave Tony a framework in which to see English life,” she said[27]. But just as important as a platform for the British character was the seaside. This was where he found the configurations of stoicism, pathos, humour and snobbery, eccentricity and gentleness that he wanted to come through in is pictures. It was where people forgot themselves and lost their inhibitions, or maintained them so stringently, that they made typical studies of the English at leisure. The amount of research he put into the project is staggering: he made alphabetical lists of coastal counties, including Wales and the Isle of Wight, and as far north as Northumberland, then supplemented them with another tightly packed alphabetical list of seaside towns with each one ticked off as he visited it. He wrote down the titles of books on England, everything from J. B. Priestley’s English Journey to Angus Wilson’s Anglo-Saxon Attitudes to Zbigniew Grabowski’s The English Psycho-analysed – though how many he read is another matter. He made a collection of English seaside postcards that ranged from Victorian crowds with their bathing machines to the bawdy antics of Donald McGill. He even made a list of films with the seaside in them: “A Taste of Honey – Blackpool”; “The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner – Skegness;
The Entertainer – Morecambe.”[28] He listed towns and villages with summer fayres and annual festivals such as those celebrated by the Coco-nut Dancers of Bacup in Lancashire, the Dickens Festival in Broadstairs, or the annual Bottle Kicking match in Hallaton in Leicestershire which has taken place on Easter Monday for at least 200 years and involves two teams kicking bottles across two streams a mile apart and a slice of hare pie. He made his own society diary for the English summer and beyond – the Chelsea Flower Show, the Eton and Harrow cricket match at Lord’s, Derby Day, Ascot, Glyndebourne, Hurlingham, Henley, grouse shooting on the 12th August, the Nottingham Goose Fair in October, the Lord Mayor’s show in London in November. Added to this were all the plus beauty pageants, fun fairs and street markets that made up working-class life in the mid-1960s. Factory holiday weeks — or “feast weeks” – were strictly regulated, every seaside town had a seasonal show. His researches were further bolstered when he discovered the work of Sir Benjamin Stone, a Victorian amateur photographer and Birmingham MP, who had travelled as far as Japan and Brazil with his camera. But what really excited Ray-Jones were his photographs of folk traditions and customs of the British Isles, which were collected in the first volume of Sir Benjamin Stone’s Pictures : Records Of National Life And History: Festivals Ceremonies and Customs in 1906. Perhaps consciously or subconsciously he was searching for the equivalent of the public theatre he’d found in the parades and street festivals in America. If so, he found it in the seaside resorts and the small towns and villages of rural England. In September 1966 Joel Meyerowitz visited him in London. “He hadn’t really developed his English eye yet. But he did show me a bunch of pictures of London and outlying places, and it was clear to me, and we talked about it, that he was able to integrate all of the stuff that he’d
learned in America, particularly from Garry, and bend it to the strangeness of English life. He had such a wicked sense of humour, very droll, very arch, and he saw that it was all there, this eccentricity, these scheduled events that were so tacky and small-townish, the seaside... So my sense of what he took away from the American experience was that going to events like this, it fed him.”[29] Two months later Ray-Jones went to a bar in Earl’s Court, ostensibly hoping to find English mercenary soldiers, who he’d been told drank there: he’d thought they would make a good story. Instead, he met a 20-year-old artist called Anna Coates. She had gone to art school in Bradford and had been living in London for a year. She was with somebody else that night, but they’d all joined up and gone on to a party, and a few weeks later he called her and asked her out. The rest, as she says, “is history”. They would be together for the rest of his life[30]. At first, she said, his abrasive self-confidence came as a shock. “I had never met anyone quite like him. Having lived and worked in New York, he brought home with him that New York brashness, which was, I think, an element in him having to adjust to English life. He was fond of saying that he found that ‘England was no place to be somebody!’. I think he was re-surprised at how entrenched the class system still was, despite the fact that he had grown up in it and been to a classic public school. Even though the barriers were steadily being broken down at the time in the music world and in films and the theatre[31].” The photography scene in London, she said, ran along several different tracks. “It was principally the age of the fashion photographer such as David Bailey, Terence Donovan, Patrick Lichfield, Norman Parkinson, Adrian Flowers. And then there were the magazine journalists like Don McCullin and Philip Jones-Griffiths and the Sunday Times, and those were the outlets. The view of photography was you were either a photojournalist, or a commercial photographer, and you did fashion and/or advertising, and took pictures of women, or cars. No one was putting
photographs up on walls and saying ‘This is Art’ as they were already doing in America. I think that Tony brought that vision. He was very enamoured of Robert Frank, and of Bruce Davidson. “However,” she added, “it seems that photojournalism was just about to re-born and reframed in ways that it never had been before in the UK. So, I think that Tony met this nascent movement head on and infused it with his own energy and vision. His timing on this front truly seemed fateful.” They were living at 102 Gloucester Place in Marylebone. “We had this very lively household going on,” Anna said, “Tony was a very gregarious man, so he had lots of friends, lots of contacts, We had troupes of people through, Garry Winogrand came to visit, jazz pianist Horace Silver came to visit. Tony was developing his seaside series, and we bought a VW camper van which we slept in, and at weekends we drove off to the seaside, or to a festival. Any folklore-type festivals happened on the Saturday or the Sunday. He did a lot of research. He plotted things out. He was quite well organised.” Meanwhile, she wanted to keep her own work going. “He was very supportive of anything I wanted to do, which at the time, with men, was fairly radical. He wasn’t the sort of person who was threatened by competent women at all. I was really grateful to have a person like that in my life, who said, ‘You’re great. I care about you. You can be anything you want to be. I’m going to help you be it.’” She, too, remembered how driven he was. “Tony always had a… not a messianic vision, but an urgency, about – ‘Look at this, this is important, you’ve got to rethink this, you’ve got to rethink the way we see photography, and it is possible to work like an artist and be an image-maker, be an independent image-maker… And just because it is a mechanistic medium doesn’t make the process mechanistic in any way. If you have a vision, it’s just like a pension. It’s the vision not the materials that makes the image.’” His insistent critical chivvying and habit of putting down other photog-
raphers’ work gave Ray-Jones a reputation for being loud-mouthed and bombastic. David Hurn, the Magnum photographer who was a friend during the 1960s, is nevertheless sceptical of the “mythologised” version of Ray-Jones that has grown up since his death, and issued something of a corrective. “Tony tried very hard to work as a photographer for magazines. And he was obviously good enough to do quite a lot of stories, but he wasn’t good enough to compete with Don McCullin and Philip Jones-Griffiths and Ian Berry and Patrick Ward and John Bulmer. So he wasn’t really taken up by this group, because he was seen as being second-division in what they were doing. He had an awkward personality that found it very difficult to say that anybody except for himself was good. “There is no doubt that his heart was in the right place. He knew what a good picture was. I would just argue that he wasn’t very good at volunteering that information to other people.”[32] Despite his misgivings, in 1967 Hurn proposed Ray-Jones as a possible member of Magnum. He was turned down. “I don’t think there was that problem with his pictures,” Hurn said. “The problem was that Tony always talked in this very extreme exaggerated way and was always playing off one person against another person. He didn’t understand that Magnum was a family, and that part of its success has been its ability to keep that family together. The reason he didn’t get into Magnum was totally tied up with his personality and nothing to do with his pictures.” For freelance photographers there were few ways to earn a living other than by editorial or advertising work. There was no market for the sale of prints, no exhibitions, very little chance of a lucrative book contract. One can see why Magnum appealed. Along with more editorial commissions, it offered syndication of his pictures and stewardship of his negatives. In 1970 he tried and failed again. “The saving grace,” Hurn said, “is that he’s got a dozen pictures that will last the test of time. All people who have enormous ability, who are
in the top layer of [making] pictures, have what’s called ‘authorship’. So if Bill Brandt and Robert Capa and Cartier-Bresson and Koudelka all went to photograph a Welsh sheepdog trial, you would be able to tell whose pictures were whose. And that’s the mark of a person who can shoot great pictures. And there is no doubt in the work Tony did, that he had great pictures, there is no debate about that.” He was starting to have success elsewhere. Some of his pictures were included in a show of new works at the Museum of Modern Art, curated by John Szarkowski (who Anna Ray-Jones had found one day sitting in her living room in Gloucester Place. “I knew he was coming, and had cleared up the apartment and cleared out of the way, but he had stayed on and on, and he did leave with several prints…”). And in the spring of 1968 he walked into the offices of Creative Camera magazine and met its editor, Bill Jay. If there is any mythologising around the life of Tony Ray-Jones, it dates from this period. Attitudes towards photography were beginning to change in Britain, exhibitions were being planned, auction house were gearing up to launch photography print sales, and a new generation of young documentary photographers, the first to receive academic training in photography in British colleges, was about to emerge. Among them was Martin Parr, who first saw Ray-Jones’s work when Bill Jay gave a lecture at Manchester Polytechnic, where he was a student. And it would be Parr, more than any of his peers, who found Ray-Jones’s work such an inspiration for his own. Creative Camera was part of this shift. It started life as Camera Owner, a subscription manual for amateurs. When it folded, Jay, who had previously worked for Photography magazine, wanted to take it over, and did so with financial help from Colin Osman, the publisher of a successful racing pigeon magazine. Osman was already a strong supporter of photography. He’d tried to get the Arts Council to back photography exhibitions
and been told it wasn’t interested. Infuriated, he wanted to see a good photography magazine succeed. Jay (who worked simultaneously as a picture editor at the Daily Telegraph) and Osman gradually changed the magazine’s focus and its title, and in 1968 launched Creative Camera with Bill Jay as editor. The anecdote about how he and Ray-Jones met would become part of British photography lore. Jay recounted it in a 20th anniversary issue of the Creative Camera: “I was under pressure to get off the next issue of the magazine, and struggling with layout sheets over my desk, when a stranger barged in. He was bedraggled with unruly reddish hair and a Fu Manchu moustache. He carried an 8 x 10 yellow box under his arm. His first words were: “Your magazine’s shit! But I can see you’re trying, so I’ve come along to help.’ Offended, I replied. ‘Then you had better put your pictures where your mouth is, because I don’t know you, or care to. Show me what you have to offer.’ He gave me the box, full of magic prints[33]. “He was an irritating, exasperating monkey on my back,” Jay continued. But he “was my self-appointed conscience and I resented and respected him for it.” Later that year, some of the pictures Ray-Jones had shown Jay, from America and England, were published in Creative Camera, among them several of his best-known today, such as the Glyndebourne picnic, with the couple in evening dress enjoying their hamper and a bottle of wine sitting surrounded by cows and sheep. (“I remember that day,” Philip said. “We were both in Sloane Square and he came in that evening and he said ‘I’ve just taken this photograph in Glyndebourne and it’s incredible, they look as if they are sitting in the field...’”). Or the very different kind of picnic, on the beach in Brighton, on a typical overcast blustery day, the women in raincoats, the man in suit and woollen socks, with a thermos balanced on the shingle. Ray-Jones wrote an introductory text to the pictures which still, more
than anything else written about them, conveys his motivations behind them. “My aim is to communicate something of the spirit and mentality of the English, their habits and their way of life, the ironies that exist in the way they do things, partly through tradition and partly through the nature of their environment and mentality. I have tried to present some of these daily anachronisms in an honest and descriptive manner, the visual aspect being directed by the content. For me there is something very special and rather humorous about the ‘English way of life” and I wish to record it from my particular point of view before it becomes more Americanised[34].” Yet America was still a magnet. In April 1968 he wrote to his friend Robert Cowley an editor at Horizon, the literary and arts magazine, in New York, thanking him for copies and filling him in on his news[35]. He’d just been to Paris, where he met the photographers Elliott Erwitt and Brassaï and, “We’ve got a little photo mag going here called Creative Camera—will send you an issue or two.” He’d been in the North for his English project: “Southerners just don’t realise the North exists. 99 % of them have never been there,” he wrote. And once he’d finished his seaside pictures in the summer, he’d be looking for a publisher. That autumn, he persuaded Bill Jay to go with him to New York. He promised to introduce Jay to the people he knew in photography, and meanwhile wanted to find a publisher for his book. He had made a dummy in a ring binder with the working title, “England by the Sea”. The results of this New York mission are recorded in a letter written the following April to James Wright at Macmillan in London. “Last October I visited many publishers in New York to show them my work and see if they were interested in publishing a book on the English using my photographs…” Of the five publishers he lists, two, US and Horizon Press, express interest but only if they can share the costs with an English
edition[36]. It never happened. The first book of his pictures wouldn’t appear until two years after his death. But in February 1969, his pictures were included in an exhibition at George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, and in April he was one of four photographers selected for solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London. The title of his show was “The English Seen”. “It gave Tony a chance to air a lot of images that had not been seen thus far of his English project,” Anna Ray-Jones recalled. “That was quite something. And all the time he was shooting and working and printing and supporting himself through photojournalism. That’s how we lived. “I think the ICA show was a surprise for a lot of people,” she added. “I think it established a beach head[37].” The British weren’t just snobbish about matters of class. They were snobbish about art. The idea that photography might be anything more than an illustration for an accompanying text was anathema to most of the art world grandees. But things were slowly changing. The ICA show proved that the distinctive qualities of Ray-Jones’s work were finally being recognised. What stood out was his ability to capture the visually absurd, as well as the sophisticated spatial choreography of his pictures. He loved the happy accident – “accidental pictures could be unforgettable” as he had been instructed in New York – but his pictures were never cruel. In fact the emotion they most often transmit is melancholy, or disappointment, only emphasised by the attempted jollity of their surroundings. Take the couple huddled together on a bench in Great Yarmouth in 1966 – the woman is staring out gloomily, the man, possibly, rests his head on her shoulder more for support than affection. Fake metal palm trees are just visible above the hoarding along a concrete wall, and a hut that looks like Noah’s ark appears to be floating over their heads like a metaphor for disaster. And at the far left of the picture, almost an inbuilt caption
to the scene, is a sign that spells out “JOYLAND “, backwards. And though much is made of his skill for controlled chaos as people arrive and depart from the frame, the most telling moments are those in which a person is isolated amongst them, stilled, held suddenly by their own thoughts. “His favourite moments are those in which people pause from activity to concentrate on something only they see,” the writer Richard Ehrlich noted. “He looks for scenes in which a sense of connection seems to pass between the subjects, yet the precise nature of the connection remains a mystery[38].” “What are these people doing?” he would ask his friend Reggie Jackson, as they pored over the pictures he produced from his darkroom. “What’s in their minds?[39]” Joel Meyerowitz wasn’t the only person to identify the influence of Garry Winogrand on Ray-Jones’s pictures, though in fact, he had the opposite approach to Winogrand’s famous dictum: “I photograph to find out what something will look like photographed.” He prefigured images in his head and went out looking for them. “Tony often had a preternatural idea of an image”, Anna Ray-Jones said, “that such and such photograph existed somewhere in time and place before he even shot it. (A simple example, I know: a man stubbornly sitting in a deck chair on an English beach in pouring rain.) And indeed, he did find such a reality.” In 1970 he was included in another ICA exhibition, a group show, Personal Views. And his English pictures were published in Bill Jay’s new, admired but short-lived magazine, Album. Much of that year was spent working on magazine stories leaving less time for the English book. He did a series of architectural pictures for Manplan, a new magazine published by the Architectural Review, and his series on English eccentrics was published in the Sunday Times as the “Happy Extremists”. In November, there was a show at the Rencontre Gallery in Paris, but by the end of the year he needed what he called, according to Anna, “‘an American breather’ . I think Tony needed to get
out of England for a while and renew himself. He really did get charged up by the States.” He had been offered a teaching job at the San Francisco Art Institute, “Which was fine with me,” she said, “because I could continue my studies, and Tony could teach part time and work for West magazine and the LA Times, do photo assignments, and we thought San Francisco was very lovely.” Also, he was growing more interested in cinema. “We had intended to move to Los Angeles,” Anna said, “because Tony decided he wanted to go into films, and I don’t know what this transition would have really been like, but he was very interested in films and he decided he would study cinematography. He was admitted to CalArts. Into the school of cinema there. “He loved the great black-and-white directors, especially French cinema: and he loved Buñuel, Fellini’s black-and-white period, black-and-white Hitchcock, early Lindsay Anderson… But, you know, I remember Robert Frank making films and they were never a great success. They weren’t necessarily successful visually, because it’s a different… it’s like whistling and then thinking you can conduct an orchestra [40].” “He had all these images in his head,” his brother Philip said. “Every so often he’d organise a trip to the Classic in Baker Street, to see the Marx Brothers, or it could be Fellini or Antonioni or Buñuel and he was never happier than when he had twenty or thirty people going. He loved Andrei Wajda, Mizoguchi, Jean Renoir, Jacques Tati. And some of the actors – like Mastroianni. Tony used to think of Antonioni when he looked at photographs – the beach huts of Morecambe, it’s straight out of Antonioni, The Red Desert.” “He’d enrolled for a director’s course four months before he died, Philip said, “So he obviously intended it. Which is a bit sad. He just wanted to move on I guess.” He left England with Anna in December 1970, just after Christmas.
They stopped off to visit friends in New York and he fitted in a feature for the Sunday Times magazine on a honeymoon hotel in Pennsylvania before arriving in San Francisco. Unsurprisingly, given his temperament, he found teaching frustrating and the students annoyed him, they all thought of themselves as artists: “favourite subjects are naked women & public hair, cocks, grainy landscapes, trees, rocks, the sea, shadows – you’ve heard it all before,” he wrote to Jay. And, some months later, “I’m definitely not cut out to teach. It made me miserable[41].” But in the same letter, in July, he writes that, in any case, he had plenty of magazine work “…in fact I have too much.” The rest of that year he spent working for both British and American magazines — Esquire, the LA Times, the Sunday Times. He mapped out a project on Californian gurus, and he travelled to Utah and New Orleans and began to work on TV and film sets. It was a kind of success, but the kind that Tony Ray-Jones, the artist, would have relegated as “commercial work”. The struggle to align his ambitions continued. He was, however, organising an exhibition of his English pictures for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, which was scheduled to open the following February. In the autumn of 1971 he began to feel unnaturally tired. Sometimes he was too weak to walk[42]. “It was apparent that something was very wrong,” Anna said. “So it put a kybosh on our plans.” Initially diagnosed as Hepatitis B, he carried on working. But in February 1972 he was diagnosed as suffering from an aggressive form of leukemia. “It took our money. It took everything,” Anna said. “And the next urgent thing was to get him the best medical help he could get. And of course, we didn’t have the right kind of insurance at the time that covered catastrophic illness, so his mother and his mother’s doctor were able to secure him a bed in the Royal Marsden [in London], where he did get very good treatment for the short time he was there.” He flew back to London and was admitted to the Marsden on March 10. His brother Philip went to visit. “I think it was the second night at the
Marsden. He’d just seen the editor of Thames and Hudson before I went. Anna wasn’t there because she was still in San Francisco. ‘Well,’ Tony told me, ‘They’ve given me nine months. So I’ve got time to shoot some more photographs for the book. I’ve got a couple of photographs I quite like.’” But by the next day, March 13, he was dead. “Two days between arriving and dying,” Philip said. “So I never knew which photographs he quite liked. The Glyndebourne one, I’m sure he always loved that. I remember the day he took it. We were both in Sloane Square then, and he came in that evening and he said, ‘I’ve just taken this photograph in Glyndebourne and it’s incredible, they look as if they are sitting in the field...’ So that could be one of the ones he liked.” Anna Ray-Jones didn’t get back to London in time to see him before his death. He was cremated at St John’s Wood crematorium and later his ashes were scattered in France, at Oppède Le Vieux, where Alexey Brodovitch’s ashes had been scattered the year before. “I remember him as the age he was before he died,” she wrote to me in an email. “Emotionally the dead never age for us. He will always be a young man to me. It’s ironic but I guess fitting that his reputation and influence has grown considerably since his death. I do believe his work has influenced a whole generation of English photographers, as people like Martin Parr will attest. I think his place in the British pantheon of photography is assured. It’s a brick in the wall.”
LIST OF PHOTOGRAPHS Beachy Head boat trip, 1967 Blackpool, c. 1968 Brighton Beach, 1969
Butlin’s Holiday Camp, Clacton-on-Sea, 1968 Chelsea Flower Show, London, 1968 Herne Bay Carnival, 1967
Ramsgate, c. 1968 Douglas, Isle of Man, 1968 Bournemouth, c. 1967 The City, London, 1967 Wimbledon Station, London, 1967
Beauty Contest, Southport, 1967 Eastbourne Carnival, c. 1967 Beauty Contest, Southport, 1967 Unknown, c. 1968 Cowes, Isle of Wight, 1968
Trooping the Colour, London, 1967 Durham Miners’ Gala, 1969 Durham Miners’ Gala, 1969 Regent’s Park, London, 1969 Windsor Park Festival, 1968
Morecambe, c. 1967 Broadstairs, c. 1967 Margate, c. 1967
Glyndebourne, 1967 Brook Street, London, 1968 Notting Hill Gate, London, 1967 Brick Lane Market, London, 1966 Wormwood Scrubs Fair, London, 1967 Coconut Dancers, Bacup, 1968 Margate, c. 1967
Blackpool, 1966 Broadstairs, c. 1967 Brighton Beach, c. 1967 Morecambe, c. 1967 Brighton Beach, c. 1967 Beauty Pageant, Newquay, c. 1967 Unknown Portobello Road Market, London, 1966 Bulins Holiday Camp, Clacton-on-Sea, c. 1967
Eton, 1967 Brighton, 1967 Ballroom, Morecambe, 1968 Wimbledon Tennis Championships, London, 1967 Butlin’s Holiday Camp, Clacton-on-Sea, 1968 Dance Festival, Yorkshire, c. 1968 Crufts dog show, London, 1968 Crufts dog show, London, 1966 Derby Day, Epsom, 1967 Windsor Horse Show, 1967 Broadstairs, c. 1967 Brighton Beach, 1967 Salvation Army, Brighton Beach, 1967 Eastbourne, 1968 Punch and Judy man, Broadstairs, 1968 Jaywick Sands, c. 1967 Margate, 1967 Newquay, 1967 Brighton Beach, 1966 Brighton Beach, 1967 Scarborough, 1968 Brighton Pier, 1967 Great Yarmouth, 1968 Great Yarmouth, 1966
Unknown Chelsea Flower Show, London, 1967 The Serpentine, Hyde Park, London, c. 1967 Great Yarmouth, 1967 Unknown Bethnal Green Road, London, 1966 Bottle Kicking, Hallaton, Leicestershire, c. 1967 Unknown Unknown Glyndebourne, c. 1967 Isle of Wight Festival, c.1968 ‘Fourth of June’, Eton, 1967 Derby Day, Epsom, c. 1967 Unknown CND March, London, c. 1968 Trafalgar Square, London, c. 1968
ENDNOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1. 2.
Day Off, Tony Ray-Jones, Introduction by Ainslie Ellis, Thames & Hudson, A London, and New York Graphic Society, Boston, 1974
3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8.
9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.
John Benton-Harris, in conversation with the author, May 2018 W all Label, New Documents, Feb 28 – May 7 1967, in Arbus Friedlander Winogrand: New Documents, New York, MoMA, 2017 In Personal Views, London, Arts Council of Great Britain, 1970 Philip Ray-Jones in conversation with the author, June 2018 In The Siren, St Ives issue, vol.12, February 2017 In Richard Ehrlich, Tony Ray-Jones, Cornerhouse Publications, 1990 Philip Ray-Jones, ibid. The friend was Robert Allen (d.2018). T ony Ray-Jones in Creative Camera, October 1968: “I had been away [in America] for five years and came back with a foreigner’s outlook as well as that of a native. This prompted me to concentrate on my own projects. I felt that England was unexplored photographically (from a non-commercial point of view), Bill Brandt being the only photographer to produce an honest and personal document on the English people.” Tony Ray-Jones archive, National Science and Media Museum, Bradford Derek Birdsall in conversation with the author, 2004 Alvin Eisenman in conversation with the author, 2004 V aleria Jean Yochem (November 14, 1930–April 22, 2018) Obituary, Groff Funeral Homes (grofffuneralhomes.com) Joel Meyerowitz in conversation with the author, 2013 Joel Meyerowitz in conversation with the author, 2004 Tony Ray-Jones archive, Bradford Ibid. Meyerowitz, 2004 Ryszard Horowitz in conversation with the author, 2013 Meyerowitz, 2013 In Ehrlich, p.11 Meyerowitz, 2013 “Happy Extremists”, Sunday Times Colour Magazine, October 1970) Tony Ray-Jones archive, Bradford Tony Ray-Jones interview, SLR Camera, April 1969 Tony Ray-Jones archive, Bradford Ibid. In Ehrlich, p.12 Tony Ray-Jones archive, Bradford Meyerowitz, Anna Ray-Jones, email correspondence with the author, February 2019 Ibid. David Hurn in conversation with the author, February 2019 Bill Jay, “Back to the Future”, Creative Camera, Vol 2 1988 Tony Ray-Jones, Creative Camera, October 29, 1968 Letter to Robert Cowley, 23 April, 1968, Martin Parr archive L etter to James Wright in Tony Ray-Jones archive, Science and Media Museum, Bradford Anna Ray-Jones, February 2019 Ehrlich, p.28 Ehrlich, p.30 Anna Ray-Jones in conversation with the author, 2004 Letter to Bill Jay, in Ehrlich, p.16 Jerry Burchard, in Ehrlich, p.16
Tony Ray-Jones, by Richard Ehrlich, Cornerhouse Publications, 1990 Tony Ray-Jones, by Russell Roberts, National Museum of Photography, Film and Television/Boot, 2004 American Colour 1962-1965, Tony Ray-Jones, MACK, 2013 nly in England, Photographs by Tony Ray-Jones, Greg Hobson, Martin Parr, O David Alan Mellor, Ian Walker, National Media Museum/Science Museum, 2014 Creative Camera, “Tony Ray Jones: photographs of America and England,” October 1968, Creative Camera 20, Bill Jay, “Back to the Future, Vol 2, 1988
With thanks to Anna Ray-Jones, Liz Jobey, Jenni Smith, Louis Little, Tom Groves, Josie Atkinson, Anna Bridson, Geoff Belknap, Michael Terway, Kira Zumkley, Kendra Bean All photographs © Tony Ray-Jones / Science Museum Group Introduction text © Martin Parr Essay text © Liz Jobey Design by Dan Mogford Edited by Martin Parr, Rudi Thoemmes & Tom Groves Sequencing and production by Martin Parr, Tom Groves & Louis Little Published by RRB Photobooks and the Martin Parr Foundation, 2019 A French edition of this title is published by Maison CF as Tony Ray-Jones: Rétrospective No part of this publication may be used to reproduced without the permission of the author Printed at Narayana Press, Denmark ISBN 978-1-9160575-0-0 rrbphotobooks.com martinparrfoundation.org