Don’t miss ‘Only in England’, a humorous, melancholic photography show at the New Media Space in London’s Science Museum that really captures the resolute post-war spirit of the English in the 60’s and beyond.
The show also explores the relationship between two photographers, Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr. The two men never met. Maverick Ray-Jones died at the age of 30 in 1972. And Parr is one of Britain’s most successful photographers. Parr credits Ray-Jones as being probably the single most influential photographer on Parr’s work. The show contains terrific images from both men.
Parr trawled through about 2,500 contact sheets of Ray-Jones late-60’s English work to come up with 55 prints that hadn’t been published before. The photographs show Brits doing what they do best – picnicking in the rain, having tea on grim seaside resorts, buying ice creams, waiting on train platforms, dressing up eccentrically for the ‘social season’, being stoic holidaymakers, generally making the best of it. As writer-in-residence at the Science Museum Mick Jackson put it, “If life is what happens in the meantime, then here is the meantime writ large. A document not of individuals, but of a people.”
October, 2013
