Big deals, big parties, big dresses – Dafydd Jones’s 1990s New York
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
In 1981, back from art school and looking for work in his hometown of Oxford, Welsh photographer Dafydd Jones decided to turn his camera on life at the university. His photographs of the beautiful and privileged eating at their dining clubs caught editor Tina Brown’s eye, and she hired Jones to shoot for Tatler in London, and later for Vanity Fair in New York. “In England, I’d become too well-known as a Tatler photographer,” Jones says of his move to the US. “It was wonderful to be invisible again.”
His latest book, New York: High Life/Low Life, collects his photographs of 1990s New York together for the first time. Working the city’s social scene with his Leica M4-2 and Starblitz flashgun, Jones chronicled the era’s mystique and couture, its pomp, big budgets and big personalities.
One photograph from 1990 catches archaeologist Iris Love’s dog (Just Desserts) and socialite Brooke Astor’s dog (Dolly Astor) as they vied for the pup-friendly canapés at a dachshund party hosted by Midtown West trattoria Barbetta. Others reveal his subjects’ resting expressions: a po-faced Rupert Murdoch at a New York Magazine celebration at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1993, or Diane von Fürstenberg contentedly sampling the catering in the bustling Four Seasons hotel kitchen during a Sunday benefit party in 1989.
It’s also a portrait of a time during which New York’s creative community was “being decimated” by AIDS, Jones writes in the introduction. “One evening I was given a list of parties, one of which was at a private apartment on 23rd Street. When I arrived, I realised something was amiss and slowed down. It was Robert Mapplethorpe’s final birthday party. A terribly sad occasion as he was clearly not long to live. He was surrounded by his friends.”
But it’s the creative energy of the era, the money that flowed through the magazines and institutions, that stand out most strongly for Jones: Aretha Franklin at the 1994 pre-Grammy celebration at The Plaza Hotel, flanked by acclaimed record producer Clive Davis and Robbie Brooks, or André Leon Talley spraying John Galliano’s hair white at Industria Superstudio photography studio. “In retrospect, these pictures are already of a very different New York City,” he writes. “Only the dramatic weather has remained the same.”
New York: High Life/Low Life by Dafydd Jones is published by ACC Art Books at £30
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