I met the photographer Dafydd Jones, 66, at his rambling compound on the end of a country road in Sussex. The amply proportioned rooms of the main house once belonged to an old chauffeur who drove around the lords and ladies of the manor next door. The former outbuildings have been turned into studios for Jones, his textile designer wife Linzi, and his artist daughter, Poppy.

Jones is best known as the society photographer of the new Bright Young Things, those wild undergraduates of Oxford and Cambridge whose fashion tastes were moulded by the BBC’s 1981 adaptation of Brideshead Revisited and whose purses were unleashed by Margaret Thatcher’s tax cuts. It was a good time to be young, white, rich, and privileged in Britain, and Jones was there to capture the hedonism of it all – though not as a posh reveller himself, but an outsider on an artistic and scientific mission. Now, many of those young faces captured by Jones’ camera have risen to the highest places in the British establishment. Looking through his archive is like playing a game of Who’s Who.

After decades in the magazine and newspaper business, Jones retreated from London to Sussex in 2015 and began to revisit the pictures that got him started. A collection of his Oxford photographs, Oxford: The Last Hurrah, was published by ACC Art Books in 2020. Other pictures from this era can be found gracing the covers of Allan Hollinghurst’s novel A Line of Beauty and journalist Simon Kuper’s Chums: How a Tiny Caste of Oxford Tories Took Over the UK, which is set to be made into a TV documentary series later this year.

On a cool afternoon in July, I sat down with Jones in his airy studio, surrounded by boxes of old prints, magazines, and test strips. We talked about his long career, his (in)glorious days in Oxbridge, and what it means to be a society photographer with artistic ambitions.

ACM: I thought to start, we could discuss your big break, which was a photography contest for the Sunday Times