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Product Description
A grafter is English slang for hard worker, with the implication of long hours and hard physical labour. Formerly a professional ballet dancer, it was among his colleagues that Colin Jones began to take photographs and through dancing that he learnt of the tremendous physical labour involved in creating something of beauty. This is an empathetic tale of industrial post-war Britain. Jones' subjects are people who endure physical hardship with dignity - miners, shipbuilders, dockers and ballet dancers. It is a collection of Jones' best work from the early 1960s to the present day and is a poignant study of manual workers and working class families at the end of the industrial era in Britain, from miners cramped and soaking against a two-foot coal seam, dockers waiting in gangs on the docks for work, shipbuilders unaware that they are labouring on the yard's last vessel as well as the un-glamourous sweat and toil of his colleagues at the Royal Ballet. "Grafters" shows the crumbling slums of the East End and now-dead miners' villages in the Northeast, holidays on the pier and in seaside boarding houses and the desperate scavenging for coal on a slag heap. It is a nostalgic portrait of poverty and physical hardship endured with dignity.
About the Author
Colin Jones followed an unusual path into photography having been a member of the Royal Ballet until his late twenties. While on tour with the Royal Ballet in the north of England he began to take pictures of the mining and ship building communities, and in the early 1960s he gave up dancing to begin his new career as a photographer at The Observer where he worked alongside other practitioners including Philip Jones Griffiths and Don McCullin. Known mostly for his portraits of rock icons of the 1960s, Grafters is an elegiac poem about a time and a way of life that has passed and that we will never experience again.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
The greatness of Grafters,
By Bobby Shaftoe (Notting Hill) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Grafters (Hardcover)
The Grafters (i.e.hard workers) who are the subjects in this book are dockers, miners, shipyard workers and - astonishingly - ballet dancers. The author, Colin Jones, knows all about the hard graft it takes to be a ballet dancer, for he was a working class boy who, like Billy Elliott, won a scholarship to the Royal Ballet School and became a principal dancer.He left the ballet in 1962 to become a freelance photographer and worked throughout the Sixties and Seventies for The Observer and The Sunday Times. This book shows you what life was really like in British heavy-duty industry in those decades,and takes you behind the scenes at Covent Garden to show just how much sweat it takes to put the artistry into dancing.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
5.0 out of 5 stars (1 customer review) 1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Honest and proud,
By Mr Niall P Mills - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Grafters (Hardcover)
So many thought provoking images, it makes you realise how tough life was for many people only a couple of decades ago. More ironic is the fact that some of the images are from the early 1990's and they sit very easily alongside the images from the 1960's. The whole book is fascinating, there is not a single image that looks contrived.It's difficult to summarise the overall impresssion you get from this book, it's probably one of pride and as the title says 'graft' - it's not at all depressing or grim, quite the opposite in fact. However, it does make you realise that our comortable, modern world is lacking in opportunity for real grafters, more is the pity. |
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