Have the English people changed much in the past half-century? Swimsuits have certainly become shorter, and the upper class no longer attends Wimbledon in bow ties. Fun fairs no longer promote striptease shows, either. However, the photographs of Tony Ray-Jones, taken in the 1960s and early 1970s, reveal the remarkable unchanging nature of England’s coastline and its small seaside towns.
The overly cold sea baths, the uncomfortable pebble beaches, and the wonderful dry irony without which England would be lost: it’s all there, immortalized in black and white by the photographer’s sharp and empathetic eye.
Ray-Jones died of leukemia, at age 31 in 1972. Despite his early death, he managed to leave behind a body of work that was almost anthropological in nature and dedicated to his compatriots’ leisure time. He roamed seaside resorts long before low-cost airlines took millions of Britons to Spain or the south of France in search of sunshine. Blackpool, Margate, Brighton… With its depressing beauty contests, wooly sweater beach picnics, and the mingling of trendy youth and uptight elderly who certainly had opinions but didn’t speak them, the England of the 1960s could hold its own against that of 2025.
Genuine empathy
Ray-Jones’s pioneering work influenced Martin Parr, another celebrated English photographer eleven years his junior. While Parr’s vision could be biting and sometimes caustic, Ray-Jones captured everyday scenes with genuine empathy.
Both artists are among the dozen or so British photographers currently featured in La Gacilly, a small town in Brittany with a population of about 4,000 that has hosted a major outdoor photography festival every summer since 2004. This year’s edition, titled “So British,” focuses on the eccentricity of English people (another section of the festival focuses on environmental issues).
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