Jon Tonks: Empire and Documentary Photography

Jon Tonks is a British documentary photographer best known for Empire, a six-year project across four remote British Overseas Territories in the South Atlantic. His second book, The Men Who Would Be King, was made in Vanuatu with the writer Christopher Lord.

Jon Tonks

Tonks is from the West Midlands and works in the UK. His site, jontonks.com, lists an MA in photojournalism and documentary photography from the London College of Communication, representation by The Photographers' Gallery in London, and commercial clients including Eurostar, Channel 4 and Microsoft. The same page lists his awards, among them the Royal Photographic Society's Vic Odden Award in 2014 and selections for the Taylor Wessing portrait prize in 2012, 2014 and 2017.

Empire

The project page for Empire describes it as a long-term project spanning six years, from 2007 to 2013, across four remote British Overseas Territories in the South Atlantic Ocean: Ascension Island, Tristan da Cunha, Saint Helena and the Falkland Islands. These are places where getting from one to the next can mean waiting for a Royal Mail ship or a military flight, and the logistics are part of what makes the body of work hold together.

The book was published by Dewi Lewis Publishing in late 2013, with a first edition limited to 1,000 copies and a second edition printed in June 2014. His books page gives the format as a quarterbound hardback of 188 pages with 80 colour images. The pictures are less about scenery than about administration and routine: British signage, service personnel, village halls, the small apparatus of sovereignty maintained thousands of miles from London.

Empire brought Tonks the Vic Odden Award from the Royal Photographic Society in 2014, an award made for a notable achievement in the art of photography by a British photographer aged 35 or under. The work has since been shown at Impressions Gallery in Bradford and Ffotogallery in Cardiff, both in 2015, and at the Midlands Arts Centre in Birmingham in 2014.

The Men Who Would Be King

Tonks's second book covers encounters in Vanuatu between 2014 and 2018, following Westerners who arrive believing themselves to be the figure named in local prophecy. The text is by the writer and editor Christopher Lord and the design is by Ania Nalecka-Milach. The page gives the format as a 200-page hardback with 72 colour plates, ISBN 978-1-911306-43-6, and notes a limited collectors' edition of five copies sold through The Photographers' Gallery.

Photographing the remains of empire

The British Overseas Territories are a small and awkward subject. The UK government's own information paper on the Overseas Territories lists fourteen of them, and in that list Saint Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha appear as a single territory, with the Falkland Islands as another. Most have very small populations, and they rarely surface in British media except when a constitutional or military question arises.

Documentary projects made there tend to run for years because travel is slow and expensive, and because the interest lies in ordinary continuity rather than events. That puts the work closer to a book than to a commission, which is why so much of it reaches readers through independent publishers.

Other long-form documentary projects we cover are listed on the speakers index, with the archive on the talks pages. Mimi Mollica, another Dewi Lewis author working over a similar timescale, is covered on his own page here.

Photo Forum is an independent journal and is not affiliated with the former PhotoForum talks group. Nothing above comes from an interview conducted by us. The details are taken from the photographer's own site, linked throughout.