Tracy Marshall-Grant considers…
Jon Tonks is a UK-based photographer whom I’ve worked with several times for exhibitions and projects from his series Empire and The Men Who Would be King. Tonks’ pictures are a real pleasure to work with; their detail, colour, context, and light make for easy installation, and the audience positivity is always right up there.
His work intrigues me with its focus on telling stories about people’s lives shaped by their history or their geography. It pricks the curious side of me as well as the aesthetic. I want to know more – about the people, the places, and the contexts.
Focus on stories
I’ve selected this picture, from the many I could have by him, as it departs a little from those I know so well. It is firstly in black & white as opposed to his more recognisable colour work, and it is also local to his home, rather than somewhere across the globe as is often his norm. Yet it still ticks all the normal Jon Tonks boxes in its focus on the history and stories of a place and people.
The picture is from a series, Pubtown, which draws his lens towards local communities and the independent pubs that sit at the heart of them. It is about where people go in their locality, the place pubs have as the hub of community and their role as cultural institutions. Tonks captures the importance of the pub in the fabric of a place and the people who live and work in it. His project is inspired by The Pub and The People, a book by Mass Observation. It was a 1930s study of an anonymous northern British town that recorded behaviour and pub culture.
Historic
This particular image is of The Bell Inn. The pub is a historic free house on the edge of Bath city centre which was purchased by 500 of its customers and workers in July 2013. This is local to Tonks’ home and was a record of the tenth anniversary of the pub’s community buy-out.
Presenting the image in black & white creates a timeless and ageless look. On first glance this could be 1930s or ’40s. The rough sides of the building al
