Dafydd Jones and the Belated Rise of the Saltburn Aesthetic
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Dafydd Jones captured the moments after the adults left the room. Starting in the late 70s, Jones photographed black tie affairs held behind the locked doors of Oxford colleges soaked in privilege and sherry, bringing the bacchanalia and class-conscious clothing choices into sharp focus. His work didn’t immediately hit, but lately, it’s everywhere. His book Oxford: The Last Hurrah has been cited again and again by Emerald Fennell as the inspiration for Saltburn. It seems to have also inspired a fair number of celebrity parties and Town & Country photoshoots.
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Jones started his career doing what college kids do, chasing money. Specifically, he began his career as a party photographer in response to a contest run by The Sunday Times, a newspaper in London that wanted documentation of student life at Oxford.
Jones talked his way into various colleges – Oxford is broken up into smaller institutions – and various parties. Socially speaking, Oxford is designed to keep out even the insiders, but Jones negotiated his way into the right rooms (the fun ones).
“There were several photographers at Oxford,” he tells SPY. “I wasn’t exactly timid, but I was quite low-key. I wasn’t setting up pictures. Sometimes, we were all at the same events. One guy would be posing people, making it look decadent. I was just photographing what was happening, and going along with the flow of the party. I come from a painting background, and I strongly didn’t believe in taking photographs that look like paintings. I didn’t want to take formal photos that followed the tradition of aristocratic portraiture. I wanted to just show what it was like.”
Jones’ photos all depict a similar scene: bowties undone, drinks hoisted into the air, tuxedo tails flapping in the wind after jumping off some tall statue. They show the underbelly of the dragon guarding the gold. They provide the same sense of voyeurism as Saltburn and The Crown, which are beloved for peeling back the layered formalities of the rich to reveal people doing their best or being their worst.
In a sense, Jones’s approach predates the rise of the Instagram party photographer, guys like Mark “@thecobrasnake” Hunter or Tyrell Hampton. Jones understood early that access mattered most. You gotta know where to be.
“People would tell me about things and I just remembered them,” says Jones. “When you’re at a party, people will say, ‘Well, are you going to such and such?’ Or they’ll say, ‘Do you know anything about the Assassins,’ which was a dining club. It was actually always a bad sign if I got invited, because usually the things I really wanted to get into I wasn’t permitted at.”
Interestingly, Jones lost that Sunday Times contest.
“I started taking pictures at Oxford in 1980,” says Jones. “I tried to exhibit them in England when I took the pictures, and no one wanted to show them.” Someone did immediately take to his work though. While The Sunday Times named someone else as the winner, legendary editor Tina Brown was then running the society magazine Tatler and offered him a job as their parties photographer. The rest was a champagne shower.
Fashion people caught on to what Jones had, which was a privilege captured in its purest, most joyful form. How the work captured reality ultimately mattered less than the way that reality was distorted by money and beauty and youth. Saltburn, which is basically a high school production of The Talented Mr. Ripley, laughed all the way to the box office on the borrowed imagery. And it’s no wonder. Masks are fun. Bottles are fun. Vomiting into topiary looks like fun.
Jones is now mining his archives for similarly fun images. His next book will document New York City in the 1980s. The man knew where to be.
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