Dafydd Jones is one of the world’s leading social photographers.

Dafydd Jones’s family moved from Carmathen to  Oxford when he was aged ten. He attended  the grammar school and  did a short introduction to photography at Oxford Polytechnic as part of a foundation course. His pictures of the Oxford University 'Bright Young Things’ attracted attention when published in 1981.

After trying him  out for a few jobs  he was hired by Tina Brown to photograph Balls, debutante dances and weddings for the Tatler magazine.

"I had access to what felt like a secret world. It was a subject that had been written about and dramatized but I don't think any photographers had ever tackled before. There was a change going on. Someone described it as a 'last hurrah' of the upper classes." - Dafydd Jones

In 1989 he moved with his wife and 2 young children to New York to work for  for Vanity Fair magazine.. Covering society events in New York and the beginnings of the media celebrity obsession. He photographed the first Vanity Fair Oscar night parties in Hollywood..

He returned  to London in 1996. In America everything was spread out over vast distances.  ‘I'd come to realise how England had everything I wanted to photograph nearby. Art, fashion the literary world, beautiful countryside and all in a soft light.'

He closed his darkroom in the mid- nineties and learnt about and  experimented with digital photography. He began doing panoramic stitched pictures of celebrity and society events and convinced the Telegraph and Evening Standard to run them each week for several years.

In 2015 after a disastrous magazine launch along with  the precipitate decline in editorial work he found himself with an empty diary for the first time since 1980. He joined a community darkroom and printed a collection of silver gelatin prints of his early pictures in a boxed set called 'Exhibition in a Box'.. The idea was that each Box could either sit on a shelf for browsing or be used as a basis  for  a  portable exhibition -‘ Originally made as gifts the boxes began selling . He went on to print 5 more smaller boxed sets . The boxes  helped generate interest in his vintage prints and also indirectly led to some of the pictures being used in a Burberry campaign. .

After many failed attempts to publish a book his first book ‘ Screen Time’ was published in October 2019. He has another book to be published in May 2020 , Oxford: The Last Hurrah.

His  work is held in the collections of:

The National Portrait Gallery, London
The Hyman Collection of British Photography, London
Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol.
Opsis Foundation. New York.
Yale Museum of British Art
The Bodleian Library, Oxford.

All images © Dafydd Jones. Used here with permission.