PODCAST: A Photographic Life, Episode 58: Plus Photographer Dafydd Jones

In episode 58 UNP founder and curator Grant Scott is in his shed considering the convergence of commissioned, editorial, advertising, personal and contemporary art photography whilst creating a new photographic degree.

Plus this week photographer Dafydd Jones takes on the challenge of supplying Grant with an audio file no longer than 5 minutes in length in which he answer’s the question ‘What Does Photography Mean to You?’

Grant expands on the points raised in this week’s podcast here https://unitednationsofphotography.com/2018/11/14/if-you-get-paid-its-commercial-if-you-get-commissioned-you-get-paid-photography-as-a-profession/

A former holiday camp photographer Dafydd Jones was a prizewinner in a 1981 photography competition run by The Sunday Times Magazine with a set of pictures titled Bright Young Things. It was these images that led the editor of Tatler magazine, Tina Brown, to hire him to photograph society balls, debutante dances and high-society weddings for the magazine. In 1989 he moved to New York and began working for the New York Observer producing feature and news related images, whilst also documenting society events for Vanity Fair magazine. During this time he also created the photographs for an entire issue of Paper magazine.  Dafydd moved back to London in 1996 and began to photograph the art world and society events for Tatler magazine, the weekly London based ES magazine and most of the UK broadsheet newspapers often with regular photograph based features, whilst he continued to contribute to Vanity Fair. In 2015 after placing his faith in what became a disastrous magazine launch Dafydd found himself with an empty diary for the first time since he started as a working photographer and joined a community darkroom to print a boxed set collection of silver gelatin prints titled Exhibition in a Box. He then went on to create two further boxed sets, Teenage Balls and Sleepers and to have his work published in a series of titles by Cafe Royal books. Dafydd continues to work as a commissioned photographer for magazines and newspapers and his work is held at The National Portrait Gallery, London, The Hyman Collection of British Photography, London, Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, Opsis Foundation, New York and the Yale Museum of British Art. www.dafjones.com

Grant Scott is the founder/curator of United Nations of Photography, a Senior Lecturer and Subject Co-ordinator: Photography at Oxford Brookes University, Oxford, a working photographer, and the author of Professional Photography: The New Global Landscape Explained (Focal Press 2014) and The Essential Student Guide to Professional Photography (Focal Press 2015). His next book New Ways of Seeing: The Democratic Language of Photography will be published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2019. He is currently work on his next documentary film project Woke Up This Morning: The Rock n’ Roll Thunder of Ray Lowry.

His documentary film, Do Not Bend: The Photographic Life of Bill Jay can now be seen at www.youtube.com/watch?v=wd47549knOU&t=3915s.

© Grant Scott 2019