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Dafydd Jones got his break as a photographer by capturing the excesses of the “bright young things” at Oxford in the 1980s – a decadent cast that included Hugh Grant and Nigella Lawson and prime ministers Cameron and Johnson. As a result, he was hired by Tina Brown as Tatler’s society photographer, with an insider’s eye for the edge between observation and satire. When Brown moved to New York in 1984 to edit Vanity Fair, Jones moved too, in 1988.
Nearly a decade later, in 1997, he was sent to photograph Vanity Fair’s annual Oscars bash by Brown’s successor as editor, Graydon Carter. He was struggling to find a good image until he noticed Mick Jagger sitting by himself looking bored, the world’s least likely wallflower. “Madonna crossed the room and sat down next to him,” Jones recalls. “She started talking and he became quite animated. Then Tony Curtis came along and sat down at the same table on the other side and started monopolising Madonna. Jagger was on his own again and looked miserable.”
For whatever reason, the magazine did not use the picture – perhaps it did not want to advertise its own party as the place where Mick Jagger had no mates – but it was part of a selection of Vanity Fair photos for the National Portrait Gallery, and is included in a new exhibition of Jones’s work at the Leica Gallery. Jones left Vanity Fair not long after this picture was taken to join Brown at her ill-fated Talk publishing venture with Harvey Weinstein. His latest, ongoing project, Screen Time, focuses on people staring at their phones when they could be having fun.
Dafydd Jones: The Vanity Fair Years is at Leica Gallery, London, from Thursday until 17 Feb
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