Biographical notes on Allen Jones

What do you get when a digital camera and powerful computerized darkroom fall into the hands of a man with a life-long passion for photography, for the visual arts in general, and for the styling of the cars that were commonplace in his youth?

In this case, where these potent tools have been taken up by Allen Jones, there's no one predictable answer — almost anything can happen.

His pictures are commonly described — where description is attempted at all — as quirky, oddball, and often playful interpretations of images he thought he had run across one summer's night in a crowded parking lot. Yet not a single parking-lot witness can be found to vouch for having seen what Jones saw, or even a near approximation.

The car guys — the purists for the most part — don't know what to make of Jones, probably because from their point of view this dissident photographer, passing among them with camera and cane, misses innumerable opportunities to actually make pictures of cars. To enjoy the images that do emerge, they have to overcome a nagging sense that the photographer — if that's what he is — could have done so much more.

Jones reflects that his toughest job involves extracting himself from his Spiffy Pictures

Not so on the arts side. Jones showed two
of his earliest prints from what would become the SpiffyCarArt series to a jury at the Cambridge Centre For The Arts. Not only did
the Centre choose to hang a photograph
among the oils and watercolours during its annual six-week-long juried exhibition, but its patrons, further, voted Jones's work People's Choice.

"I had no ambition to step across into the gallery scene," says Jones. "I thought they'd
view me as an interloper, there, maybe brush me off with some condescending comment so they could collect my entry fee.

"But my family and my friends who were looking at these pictures, the prints I was doing for my own enjoyment at the time, kept encouraging me to show them in a venue larger than my two-picture-wide workspace at home. Little did I expect my contribution would attract the kind of attention it takes to win an arts award."

That initial attention opened the door for a one-man exhibition in the private gallery of the Sun Life building in nearby Kitchener.

As probably the worst marketing promoter in the history of the pixel, not to mention the most reluctant self-promoter and most inept experienced computer user, Jones needed a lot of cajoling to launch the SpiffyCarArt web site — repeated appeals and a lot of technical help from his friends.

Jones is a veteran of some 35 years in journalism, first as a news photographer for the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, then as a writer for pretty well all the photography magazines in Canada at the time — professional publications and consumer magazines alike — and finally as a freelance writer and photographer in industrial and business magazines.

With health issues now limiting his mobility, Jones works two or three cruise nights a week in summer, harvesting the raw materials — he calls it Not-Yet SpiffyCarArt — for the pictures he will concoct at the computer screen over the winter months.