Beautiful document of the British at leisure. Ray-Jones spent some time in America during the early to mid 1960s, training as a graphic designer at Yale and later with Alexey Brodovitch. On returning to England in 1966 he sought to photograph the ‘English Way of life’, in particular how people spent their leisure time. ‘I want my pictures to bite like the images in Buñuel’s films which disturb you while making you think. I want them to have poignancy and sharpness but with humour on top My aim is to communicate something of the spirit and the mentality of the English, their habits and their way of life, the ironies that exist in the way they do things, partly through tradition and partly through the nature of their environment and mentality.’ Roth in The Open Book pp.302-3. A real classic.
