Christmas cracker

Tony Ray-Jones's tips on how to be a good photographer

I have been meaning to write about a pre-Christmas visit I made to the best photography exhibition I have seen in a long time.

'Only in England' displayed the work of Martin Parr and the late Tony Ray-Jones and it was the first exhibition to be held in the Science Museum's new Media Space.

I wrote about the pair's work on this site on September 22 after The Guardian featured the exhibition in its pages. So there is no need to repeat those thoughts.

But it is worth explaining what made this show so special.

First, there was Ray-Jones' wonderful eye for detail and his ability to tell several stories in one complex image. One shot immediately comes to mind of an outdoor cafe at Windsor Horse Show in 1967. The eye is immediately drawn to a man, legs bent, about to sit down at a table alongside a slightly shifty-looking gentleman wearing a trilby and sunglasses and sporting a jacket and tie. Meanwhile a dappled grey pony walks between them and the counter, followed two yards behind by a little Jack Russell terrier. The lady behind the counter carries on brewing tea as if the scene before her is the most 'normal' imaginable.

Tony Ray-Jones & Martin Parr

I had never realised the debt that Martin Parr owed to Tony Ray-Jones, a photographer who died of leukaemia when aged just 30 in 1972.

Ray-Jones was a brilliant documentary photographer who often packed huge complexity into his observational photographs. The top image is by him and was taken at Eastbourne in 1968. Close inspection will reveal several narratives within the one image.

Parr is famous today for his highly saturated colour photos of the British at leisure, but earlier in his career he took black and white photos that were very reminiscent of Ray-Jones’ work. The second photo is a good example - showing the besuited Tom Greenwood cleaning in 1976.

But even Parr’s later colour-saturated images are strongly evocative of Ray-Jones. His famous seaside photos have strong echoes of his predecessor’s Eastbourne picture - capturing the quirky side of life and including different narratives within the same frame.