Jon Tonks Guest Lecture

Jon Tonks started as a staff photographer. His independent work that he is most renowned for started with his trip to Ascension Island. Ascension Island is currently used as a military base and is also a volcanic island. Jon visited Ascension Island 3 times to get the images he wanted; he would have visited more but it is very expensive to travel because the only way of travelling there is on a RAF flight. The population of 900 is an indication of how small the island is.

Ascension Island’s culture has quite strict rules, one of which being that if you haven’t acquired a job by the age of 18, you must leave the island. The island used to be used a lot for farming, but farming got disbanded so the majority of the cows were slaughtered, leaving just 2. Those two cows were set free and roamed the island making it a rare occurence of seeing a cow. Before Jon Tonks visited island it had been reported that one of the cows had died leaving just a single cow roaming the island. In Jon’s collection of image there is a few of the single cow that he spotted only once in his whole time on the island. Although the image to most people looks quite ordinary; just a picture of a cow, the story adds much depth to the photograph.

After he had concluded the project of the Island, Jon Tonks went to Rhubarb Rhubarb to collect feedback about the project, they said that it could be broadened. So after more research he decided to expand the project and visit a nearby island called St Helena.

St Helena has a broad ethnicity due to different countries claiming the island as its own. Because, like Ascension island, St Helena is small, there are parts of the island that seem quite peculiar to most visitors. For example, the Prison only hold 12 people, and if the sentence is longer than 5 years, the prisoner is sent to England. Therefore, there are a lot of people charged with smaller sentences than if they had been in England because of cost. Also, the upstairs of the prison was previously used as a video store.

One of my favourite images by Jon Tonks was of a man holding a weather balloon. He records the weather everyday and sends the information off for records to be kept in England. He has been recording the weather with this balloon since 1976. During his time on St Helena he was also invited to visit the governor of St Helena’s house. He received a very formal invitation from the Governor with the Governor’s wife’s name simply crossed out (she had injured herself).

He then also travelled to Tristan Da Cunha to expand his project further. The island is even smaller than Ascension Island and St Helena; there are only 7 surnames on the whole island and this year there are currently 267 people on the island. Because of the low population and tight-knit community, the crime rate is particularly low; the police officer that Jon Tonks met has been working as an officer for 25 years and is yet to make an arrest.

After visiting Tristan Da Cunha, he moved away from that set of islands and felt that the project would be incomplete without visiting the Falkland Islands, as they are part of the British overseas territory. The Falkland Islands are around the same size as Wales, but still the community is quite tight-knit. Because it is not part of the mainland most people have multiple jobs and the airports are basically small huts.

After editing the project in full, his project, Empire, was published in magazines and new papers like The Telegraph and The Guardian. He also worked with Martin Parr to select his best images and narrow down his project to create a book. He needed to find a lot of money to create his work but finally, he published Empire with Dewi Lewis.

He is currently working on a project about Papau New Guinea and how there is an American Man who believes he is God of Papau New Guinea and there is also a French Man who believes he is King of the country.