Tony Ray-Jones (UK)
The English
Market Square, St Peter Port
1 - 30 June / Outdoor display
Admission Free
Tony Ray-Jones exhibition on Market Square documents the distinctive eccentricities of the British leisure classes of the 1960s with surreal humour.
In association with National Media Museum.
Tony Ray-Jones studied at the London School of Printing before obtaining a scholarship at Yale University of Art in the early 1960s. A five-year period in the USA and his studies at Yale were of great importance to his artistic development. When he returned to Britain in 1965 he travelled around seaside towns, villages, cities and festivals to survey the English at leisure, trying to document the English way of life ‘before it became too Americanised’. His documentary photographs are full of a somewhat surreal humour and show the influence of American photographers such as Henri-Cartier Bresson and Garry Winogrand.
Sadly Tony Ray-Jones was diagnosed with leukemia in 1971 and died at the young age of 30. It was only in 2004 that his work received a full retrospective exhibition at the National Media Museum of Photography in Bradford, England.
