![]() ![]() I’d caught glimpses of that world as a ‘townie’ and felt very comfortable mixing with the different groups. “I wanted to say something about the university world, and to photograph what really happened behind closed doors. While Jones never set out to be a society photographer, he was interested in capturing the “Bright Young Things” of the era, a reference to another of Waugh’s novels, “Vile Bodies.” Having entered - but not won - a photo contest run by The Sunday Times of London, Jones was spotted by Tina Brown, an Oxford alumna herself, who had transformed Tatler into a hot society magazine in those years, and he began shooting parties for her. There was a resurgence of dining clubs and dressing up for parties.” With hindsight, it was after the election of Margaret Thatcher, and the rich were benefiting from generous tax cuts and had started to feel confident again. Suddenly formal dress and black tie were becoming de rigueur. ![]() Having spent so many years observing and interacting with the Oxford students, Jones says that by the time the Eighties rolled around, “I’d already noticed that the students were no longer dressing like long-haired tramps. He would later set up a photo studio near one of the Oxford residential colleges, and would shoot for the student magazine and for Oxford University Press. ![]() He attended a state-run high school in town, and worked in the Bodleian Library and as a cleaner on the campus before attending Winchester School of Art. Jones, who was born in Wales, didn’t go to Oxford but spent his youth there. It was a small group of people who wanted to have a sort of fantasy,” Jones says in an interview. Indeed, Jones himself, who had been shooting at Oxford since the late Seventies, said the years encapsulated in his book “felt like the end of something” and that students such as Cameron and Johnson “were trying to revive something that no longer existed. Amid the joy is sadness, loneliness, fear and regret.” He wrote that Jones’ pictures capture the swagger of the students, “and the melancholy that Waugh’s novel also conjured up. Richard Ovenden, who is in charge of the Bodleian Libraries at Oxford, and who purchased a set of Jones’ images for the archives, notes in the foreword to the book that, during the Eighties, the campus was “contagiously infected with the ‘Brideshead Revisited’ fever that swept certain segments of British society” after the adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s book was screened on TV. Helena Bonham Carter was the decade’s leading lady, while “Brideshead Revisited” and Lord Sebastian Flyte, still clutching his teddy bear Aloysius at Oxford, proved irresistible to many. “Chariots of Fire,” “Another Country” and the Merchant-Ivory costume dramas like “A Room With a View” ruled the big screen. Boris Johnson and Allegra Mostyn-Owen, Sultans Ball, Oxford Town Hall, March 10, 1986. ![]()
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