Dick Jewell: 50 years of not giving a fuck

“My old drinking partner,” says Dick Jewell, turning the page on his catalogue and gesturing briefly at the portrait. He waits for my reaction. “Francis,” he adds.

We’re looking at a picture, taken by Jewell, of the unmistakable face of Francis Bacon. He’s smiling slightly, wearing an old baggy jumper. The backdrop is dreary; a mundane, cloudy London day. In front is what looks like a scruffy old pub. Within a moment, Jewell – in a pork pie hat – flips the page onto his next photograph.

The South London veteran artist and photographer is not exactly a household name. Many people of his generation, including his old drinking partner, have had slightly more attention throughout their artistic careers. Yet he’s demonstrating to me that he’s mixed it with the greats, for a long time. He might even be an equal.

Earlier in our interview, he asks – with what might be a glare – whether I knew his work. The fact I hadn’t written a PhD on all things Dick Jewell did not go down so well. But, if he’s engaging in a power play, in a bit of a masculine flex, then perhaps – perhaps – Jewell can be forgiven. Because, more than five decades into his career, he is the subject of his first retrospective.

Held at Graces Mews in Camberwell, the exhibition brings together more than seventy works, including collages, photographic assemblages, film installations, digital montages and prints. It is accompanied by the publication of Catalogue: Dick Jewell, a mammoth book that charts the development of his approach from the late 1960s to the present.

Jewell seems fairly intent on sizing me up before engaging in our interview. “So what’s going on here then?” He’s motioning with a wave of his arm to decades-old bodies of work as we walk through the exhibition together. He waits for me to answer, his eyes narrowing as I try and interpret them in real time.

Jewell’s practice has always been grounded in an irreverent and, let’s say, sharp sense of observation. Since he began salvaging discarded photobooth images in 1968, he has maintained a commitment to arranging and reframing visual material. What began as a habit of gathering found photographs grew into a systematic exploration of how we see ourselves and each other – across newspapers, television, family albums and, later, the internet. His early experiments with photobooth strips laid the foundation for Found Photos (1979), a handmade book that brought together anonymous portraits retrieved from the street. “I chopped it up, laid it out, and sent it off to be bound,” he recalls. “Back then, you had to rephotograph everything and make plates. It wasn’t trial and error. You had to know the process before you started.”

That grounding in photographic printing came from formal training in printmaking at art college, where Jewell learned the technical processes that would enable him to self-publish and distribute his work. He took early copies of Found Photos to shops including The Photographers’ Gallery, the Serpentine and specialist bookstores in Holland and New York. “It was about getting the work physically out there,” he says. “You’d carry it into the shop yourself, leave it on sale-or-return, and hope someone picked it up. That’s how museum curators first saw my work.”

Jewell’s early books reached an audience beyond the art world. He later republished Found Photos in a revised edition, expanding it to include a longer essay and additional images. It helped raise his profile, opened doors to exhibitions, and positioned books and printed matter as a core part of his creative output – long before the current interest in photobooks as a key launch pad for artists outside of the gallery world.

The retrospective at Graces Mews traces Jewell’s move from analogue to digital. It includes hand-cut newspaper collages from the 1970s, montages based on television stills from the 1980s, and more recent works made using Photoshop. His interest has always been in how media shapes perception. He draws from a range of visual sources: news reports, advertising, home videos, police footage and fashion spreads. The resulting compositions often feature stark or unexpected juxtapositions – images that were never meant to appear side by side but, once placed together, generate new meanings.

“Growing up, we saw people dying on television,” he says. “That became part of the normal media diet – war zones, starvation, protest, all blended with entertainment and advertising. I wanted to respond to that.” One early series used stills from television news and Hollywood films to highlight the overlap between real and staged violence. Another assembled 300 portraits of American tobacconists, retrieved from a discarded file in New York, and presented them not as a document of tobacco culture but as a record of fashion, posture, gender, and class in mid-century America. “You see people all wearing ties, or a certain expression. Things come through that weren’t intended. Especially as time passes.”

If he was touchy, sensitive to his stature, then it’s because Jewell seems to have lived – and often lived with – his work. Without a studio at one point, he tells me he laid out the tobacconist portraits across the hallway of his flat, for months stepping over them to get from his bedroom to the kitchen.

The tone of Jewell’s work varies. Some pieces are deadpan, others overtly political, some ironic or absurd. A montage of a sexualised woman holding a weapon raises questions about the eroticisation of violence and the casual way war imagery circulates. “Is it glorifying war?” he asks. “Or is it just wrong?” Rather than offering a clear moral position, Jewell wants us to consider how such images function in our daily lives. Just make sure you get the answer right.

In the 1980s, Jewell expanded into moving image. He documented subcultures in London, from the Kalahari Desert to Notting Hill Carnival and the queer club nights of Kinky Gerlinky. His Super 8 films captured scenes that were often ignored by mainstream media. These works have been shown at venues including Tate Modern, ICA, and the Venice Biennale, and reflect a continuity with his collage practice: combining found footage and surreal fragments of popular media.

During the same period, Jewell also founded the record label PRE, under the umbrella of Charisma Records. It was a chance connection – Peter Gabriel saw his degree show and invited him to meet the label’s A&R team. That led to him signing reggae and soul artists and designing their album covers. “I wasn’t trying to build a label,” he says. “It just happened. I used what I earned to buy a camera and start filming. I was more interested in making than marketing.”

It’s here that Jewell finally starts to relax. He begins to tell me how his connection to reggae music grew from his youth in South and East London, where he would visit the Georgian Club, a West Indian social club in Stratford. “None of my mates would go,” he recalls. “But they adopted me. I was the only white face in there, and they let me DJ at lunchtime. That was before reggae became mainstream, before Trojan or Greensleeves. It stayed with me.” It’s not difficult to imagine him spinning vinyl of some obscure reggae at home, the smoke curling up to the ceiling. His friendship with musicians such as Horace Walker, and his documentation of grassroots sound system culture, seems to be the thing he’s most proud of.

Today, Jewell continues to produce new work and teach at the Royal College of Art. His newer pieces include appropriations of AI-generated images found online – portraits of people photoshopped into Mona Lisas or Renaissance figures. “I haven’t used AI myself,” he says. “But I’m interested in how people use these apps to remake themselves. That tells us something.”

His exhibition at Graces Mews reflects a consistent thread: an interest in how we use images to express identity, belief, desire and control. Whether it’s a collage of magazine clippings or a Super 8 film of a street party, his work insists that images are never neutral. “My work’s about attitude,” he says. “It’s about how people carry themselves, what they show, what they give away without realising.”