Colin Jones

Peter Fetterman Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

“Don’t be influenced by others. Shoot what you like.” - Colin Jones

“The film and musical of “Billy Elliott” could have been based on Colin Jones’s life. Colin came from a tough London working class, turbulent background and found some kind of stability by being enrolled in the Royal Ballet training school and then invited into the Royal Ballet proper and travelled the world as a dancer with that distinguished much respected company. On his travels he discovered photography and found he had a natural talent for it and started working with The Observer newspaper as a valued photojournalist in 1962. He was a natural storyteller and was particularly attracted to stories about working class communities in Northern England. He knew he was living through a time of change that England was going through and that
many of these communities would no longer survive the onslaught of modernization.

This is my favourite image of his, which is not judgmental but has a deep sense of humanity and a moment of universal joy. The scene could have come out of a novel of D.H. Lawrence or George Orwell or out of all those wonderful English movies of the 1960’s that my generation grew up with, “Room at the Top," “This Sporting Life," "The Loneliness of The Long Distance Runner” and “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning.”” – Peter Fetterman