A day off: 120 photographs

Tony Ray-Jones died at age 30 in 1972, too young by any measure. I first noticed Tony Ray-Jones in the British magazine, Creative Camera, and that exposure led me to buy the book when it came out. This book may or may not represent his best work, but it is plenty good enough. One must wonder what he would have done had he lived a normal lifespan.I had not looked at this book for a long time, and it pleasantly surprised me when I did. Ray-Jones shot these in the late sixties, and they present a picture of British society that is both familiar (I spent most of the summer of 1967 in England) and strange. For people of my age (64 as I write this), the late sixties mean the Beatles, psychedelic colors, and similar revolts from the conventional. There is none of that here. Instead, we mostly have black and white images of the middle class away from work, mostly on holiday. And most of these could have been taken a decade earlier or later. Timelessly British.Some of his acknowledged influences include Bill Brandt, Robert Frank, Paul Strand, and Alexei Brodovitch--a pretty diverse group indeed.There are no technical notes in the book, but these appear to have been shot with a 35mm camera, mostly with a 50mm lens, and probably on either Kodak Tri-X or Ilford's HP4. I will leave it to someone else to research that if they think it important.