Dick Jewell won’t remember but he was one of the first artist’s books I stocked at MOMAOxford when I first ran the Bookshop there and he brought me copies of his wonderful ‘Found Photos’ (still a treasured possession)
This started me on a mildly obsessive compulsive quest and found that I too found photos quite often in the street. I looked behind photo booths (still do and every time I read about Dick’s career I think to start again!) but it brought scant results maybe things were more productive where he was living then.
My old friend and then Assistant Director at MOMAO
, Marco Livingstone, who confided he too found many discarded photos (many of his I still have) and I wondered about doing a companion volume or approaching Dick with our own found work. The only slight snag was that Marco (I am sure he won’t mind me saying!?) and my own finds were almost exclusively unpublishable filthy! Something about being near MOMAO in central Oxford perhaps but I found envelopes of pictures of a masochist doing quite unspeakable things to himself discarded in the street that I best not describe here! Marco also found some heart breaking discarded shots that featured often semi-clad young women with their faces obliterated or torn fragments thereof and scribbled over some showing intimate details of the body so that such a proposed volume for Dick would have needed an ‘X’ rating! I still have a mini-collection of Marco's and my found photos and it is all Dick Jewell's fault!!
Peter Gabriel, 1979
© Dick Jewell. Courtesy of Grace’s Mews
