Regular readers of my posts will know that Tony Ray-Jones is one of my personal photographic heroes, although I never knowingly met the man but we possibly attended some of the same openings and other events in London before his tragic early death in 1972. I also own several of his pictures, and one of the relatively few prints that he made himself hangs on my wall, from his ICA show. The others are cheap inkjet prints from the Science & Society Picture Library which I think are better quality than most if not all of the silver gelatin prints that have been made direct from his negatives. Although these now cost £15 for an A4 print (more than a 50% increase since I bought mine), the last time I saw a gallery show of his work the asking price for the inferior prints on display was more than 100 times this. Collecting good photography needn’t be expensive – just avoid the art dealers. Some photographers, including myself, sell their work at reasonable prices directly from the web too.
One of the essential aspects of photography has always been its reproducibility, the ability to make a theoretically infinite number of copies from a negative. (Of course this was not true of the daguerreotype – and this is just one reason why this is no longer a popular process!) The switch to digital, whether at the point of exposure or in scanning negatives, has made this process even easier. It has also revolutionised printing, enabling us to get more out of our negatives, particularly those where the exposure was not optimal – and apparently although Ray-Jones was a great photographer he was certainly not a great technician.
Although a few have sought to deny it, Tony Ray-Jones had an undeniably enormous influence on British photography in the 1970s, not just through his own work, but also because he and a few others were largely responsible for getting a huge swathe of mainly American photography, hitherto only known to a few cognoscenti (including of course some established British photographers who were well connected through international agencies) out to a new generation of photographers, through magazines and particularly ‘Creative Camera, where the then editor Bill Jay first published Ray-Jones’s personal work in the UK. You can read about these on Weeping Ash, a great web site by Roy Hammans which includes a great deal of writing on both Ray-Jones and Creative Camera, and of course quite a few photographs.
But what prompted this post was an article on the Little Brown Mushroom Blog, where Charlie B Ward has been asking photographers about the “first photo book that you can remember buying or seeing that really had a strong affect on you?” and Mark Power‘s answer was A Day Off Tony Ray-Jones (Thames and Hudson 1974). But of course he had something more to say about it in a story that includes wading into ice-cold water to photograph a whale and unrequited love, and makes interesting reading. Boringly I think I just bought the book from the Creative Camera Book Room.
You can still pick up copies at least of the US edition of this work at a not unreasonable price, but the recent volume Tony Ray-Jones (ISBN:095428139X) published by Chris Boot in 2008 is considerably better printed, far more informative and a better bargain.