LONDON.- The Photographers’ Gallery presents The Last Hurrah, a solo exhibition by British photographer Dafydd Jones (b.1956) which reveals the upper echelons of English society at play during 1980s.

The exhibition is on display, with all works available for acquisition, in the Print Sales Gallery from 3 August– 8 September 2018.

Jones worked as a social photographer from the early 1980s onwards, contracted by such publications as Tatler, Vanity Fair, The New York Observer, The Sunday Telegraph, The Times and Independent.

After winning a photography competition run by The Sunday Times magazine in 1981 with a set of pictures of the ‘Bright Young Things’, Jones was hired by Tatler magazine editor Tina Brown to photograph Hunt Balls, society weddings and debutante dances.

This exhibition explores Jones’s behind-the-scenes images taken in the years that followed, between 1981-1989, known as ‘The Tatler Years’. From burning boats at Oreil college, to canapes, pearls and full-frontal snogging – Jones captures those forgotten eccentric moments in the midst of a wild party.

Dafydd Jones states that “I had access to what felt like a secret world. It was a subject that had been written about and dramatised but I don’t think any photographers had ever tackled before. There was a change going on. Someone described it as a ‘last hurrah’ of the upper classes.”