Friday, June 27, 2014

Tony Ray-Jones at Hallaton in 1967



You have two more days to visit the photographic exhibition Only in England at the National Media Museum in Bradford, though it will tour the country after it closes there. It has already been staged at the Science Museum in London.

The write up on the Bradford museum's website explains its appeal:
'Only in England: Photographs by Tony Ray-Jones and Martin Parr' examines the close relationship between the work of these two important photographers and their fascination with the English. 
Intrigued by the eccentricities of English social customs, Tony Ray-Jones spent the latter half of the 1960s travelling across England, photographing what he saw as a disappearing way of life. 
Humorous yet melancholy, these images had a profound influence on photographer Martin Parr, who has made a selection from our Tony Ray-Jones archive for this exhibition including over 50 previously unseen photographs. 
Parr's selection will be shown alongside his rarely seen work, The Non-Conformists, which documents a declining traditional way of life in 1970s Hebden Bridge.
If you are looking for eccentric social customs then you can't do better than the bottle kicking and hare pie scrambling that takes place at Hallaton in Leicestershire each Easter Monday. Sure enough, as the photograph above shows, Ray-Jones visited this event in 1967. (Later. But why does the shopfront say 'Hungerford?' Hmm.)

The video below will tell you more about the exhibition and the two photographers.

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