Photograph courtesy of Tony Ray-Jones / RIBA Collections
Justine Sambrook, Curator of the Robert Elwall Photographs Collection at RIBA, delves into their rich collection to introduce a photograph by Tony Ray-Jones, part of a controversial attempt by Architectural Review to reinvigorate architectural photography.
Tony Ray-Jones and Manplan
This image is by the photographer Tony Ray-Jones and shows a boy posing in his living room in the Pepys Estate in Deptford, South London. It’s one of a number taken by Ray-Jones for the journal the Architectural Review in 1970. The journal was very experimental in its presentation of architecture, and in particular its use of photography, and published a series of issues from 1969–70 called Manplan.
This commissioned leading photojournalists and street photographers to examine the various concerns of British life and the effect that design and infrastructure had on it at the time. The results were radically different from the carefully composed shots of pristine, empty buildings taken by architectural photographers on large format cameras that were usually published in such journals. Often shot using fast film on a 35mm camera, these photographs were gritty and dynamic and, most importantly, showed people using the buildings that architects designed, often not very successfully! As well as Ray-Jones, photographers included Tim Street-Porter, Patrick Ward and Ian Berry.
In addition to the unprecedented use of photojournalistic imagery, the journal also developed a special matte black printing ink that would enhance the atmosphere of claustrophobia.
Photograph courtesy of Tony Ray-Jones / RIBA Collections
Tony Ray-Jones and other mid-century architectural photography
The Architectural Review had a history of using informal photography rather than conventional architectural photography within its pages. Even as early as the 1930s, amateur shots by the artist John Piper were used to illustrate articles by J.M. Richards on vernacular British buildings, and by the mid-1950s many issues were sprinkled with casual snaps taken by the Review’s journalists.
The 1960s saw many British photographers beginning to experiment with a more photojournalistic way of working. One of he first published examples of this were photographs of Park Hill in Sheffield taken by Roger Mayne and printed in Architectural Design in 1961, although Nigel Henderson’s photographs of the East End taken immediately post-war can be considered architectural and were highly influential on the architects Alison and Peter Smithson. Mayne’s photographs showed people going about their everyday lives with the brand new architecture as a backdrop rather than the focus of the composition.
The architectural photographer who made this approach his own was John Donat, whose work often deliberately flew in the face of architectural convention with its dynamic, informal compositions often populated with people actively making use of buildings. Donat could be a provocateur, delivering a lecture at the RIBA in 1967 entitled “The Camera Never Lies” in which he criticised traditional architectural photography for its preoccupation with pattern and symmetry rather than attempting to convey a true sense of a building. He playfully captioned one of his images, of the Boots Factory in Beeston featuring two men sheltering under an umbrella, “Why does it never rain in the Architectural Review?” in reference to the proliferation of sunny images in the architectural press. Manplan was the extreme result of this move towards a more humane architectural photography.
The 1970s saw a rise in the use of colour in architectural photography as film and processes became cheaper and easier to use but the slow speed of the film banished movement from the shot and brought about a return to the tradition of unpopulated images of buildings against perfect blue skies that Manplan had done so much to overturn.
Photograph courtesy of Tony Ray-Jones / RIBA Collections
Tony Ray-Jones and the reception of Manplan
Manplan wasn’t well received. The story goes that the architect readership of the Review were so unimpressed by this less than glowing representation of their professional endeavours that subscriptions fell dramatically and the experiment was cancelled after just eight issues. In a review of the first 100 years of the journal’s history the Architectural Review wrote scathingly in 1996 that Manplan “had little or no foundation in social, economic or political reality: image was all.”
The career of Tony Ray-Jones
Tony Ray-Jones had a brief but brilliant photographic career before his death from Leukaemia aged just 30 in 1972. His work is highly acclaimed and he is rated among Britain’s best photographers, but his work on Manplan is little known. Although the architectural angle was a move away from his usual documentary photography, his images for the Review nevertheless demonstrate his characteristic eye for surreal yet slightly melancholy humour and an affection for the ordinary person.
Seeing more work by Tony Ray-Jones
The Manplan photographs are part of RIBA’s Architectural Press Archive, a collection of over 600,000 images that were commissioned or collected for publication in the Architectural Review or the Architects’ Journal between the 1930s and the 1980s. It’s an incredible archive of imagery, containing work by some truly amazing photographers including Dell & Wainwright, the official staff photographers in the 1930s and 40s, and other architectural photographers such as Eric de Maré, John Donat, and Henk Snoek. There are shots by famous artists and photographers like Lazlo Moholy-Nagy, Bill Brandt, John Piper, Bernd and Hiller Becher and Julius Shulman. But it’s also a useful resource for researching British architecture of the period because it is so comprehensive.
This photograph, along with many others from both Manplan and the Architectural Press Archive, has been digitised and can be viewed online at RIBApix.
Photograph courtesy of Tony Ray-Jones / RIBA Collections
Useful links
Discover more mid-century images at RIBApix, a visual archive showcasing over 85,000 images from the collections of the British Architectural Library at the Royal Institute of British Architects.
Find out more about how to see the real photograph or copies of the Architectural Review by visiting the British Architectural Library here
Read our post on how contemporary documentary photographs reflected the debates around postwar social housing
For other articles on mid-century architectural photography, see our pieces on John Pantlin and Edwin Smith