Homer Sykes & Dafydd Jones: Book Works

PRIVATE RECEPTION  |  Wednesday 8 September, 6-9pm
Join the artists to celebrate the opening of their exhibition

Q&A  |  Saturday 11 September, 3-6pm
Drop in for a chance to meet the artists and hear about their work

Book Works, is a collaborative exhibition that features the work of two British social documentary photographs Dafydd Jones and Homer Sykes. During the eighties both found themselves photographing many of the same events from the English social season. Part financed by magazines and book publishers they both made work in their own distinctive reportage styles. A tradition established so eloquently by the likes of the great Picture Post photographers, Bert Hardy, Thurston Hopkins, Grace Robinson and other socially engaged photographers of that time.

Dafydd Jones’ Book Works comes from a series he undertook during the nineteen eighties in Oxford. Various picture editors and publishers, have gone through Dafydd’s Oxford pictures many times over the last 30 or so years; often looking through his photographs of a cast of characters which includes Boris Johnson, David Cameron, Hugh Grant, Nigella Lawson, Ghislaine Maxwell and future members of the aristocracy and establishment. In 2019 Dafydd went through all the pictures and made what he thought was a definitive edit which resulted in the book, Oxford: The Last Hurrah (ACC Art Press) that proved a great success. Then during the first lockdown Dafydd revisited this body of work, and came across a previously unnoticed photo of a fridge being thrown out of an upper floor window during a student Ball at Christchurch College, Oxford. This encouraged him him to continue to look again for other overlooked pictures hidden amongst the contact sheets- which may result in an enlarged edition of the book. He will be showing some of these newly discovered pictures along with many favorites.