UK council criticised over sale of assortment together with works by pioneering photographer Tony Ray-Jones – The Art Newspaper

The UK’s Kent County Council is promoting off a bit of its artwork assortment on Tuesday (10 March), together with a cache of prints by Tony Ray-Jones, a key determine in postwar British pictures.

The auction options 168 from the council’s assortment, together with an early work by the British artist Andy Goldsworthy, a lithograph by Australian artist Sidney Nolan, and a major archive of 33 images by Ray-Jones, many depicting public festivities and native traditions throughout the county.

The Reform-led council says the gathering has been saved within the basement of County Hall in Maidstone and now wants to maneuver. “Due to the lack of viable alternative storage options and in light of the significant financial pressures facing the county council, no suitable alternatives were identified,” a spokesperson tells The Art Newspaper. However, the council admits that the works haven’t been supplied to any of the county’s museums or galleries. The authority additionally faces a severe budget deficit, and Reform has yet to deliver tax cuts promised forward of profitable management of Kent in final spring’s native elections.

The council had not responded to a request for touch upon the explanations for promoting the work, and whether or not it or a earlier administration initiated the sale, by the point of publication.

“The disposal of significant photography and other artwork [from public collections] is always a concern, especially when it includes rare work from figures such as Tony Ray-Jones—one of Britain’s great documentary photographers and an inspiration to luminaries such as the late Martin Parr,” the pictures historian Michael Pritchard tells The Art Newspaper. “Kent’s short-term financial gain will be at the long-term cultural expense of Kent residents and visitors.”

Ahead of an earlier sale of works from the gathering, held at Sworders Fine Art Auctioneers in July 2025, the council stated that an unnamed artwork historian had suggested that the gadgets on the market “might not represent any official historic value but are nonetheless interesting”. That sale included works by established artists together with Norman Ackroyd, Victor Passmore and Anthony Gross, lots of which illustrated city and nation scenes from round Kent. The internet earnings was £29,060, the council spokesperson says, which they are saying was put in the direction of a “Culture and Creative Economy Service revenue budget“. The Art Newspaper has requested more details of the budget.

John Brazier, who was the head of arts and museums at Kent Council from 1990 to 2005, takes a different view. He acquired the Tony Ray-Jones photographs that are in the sale, after an exhibition that toured the county in the late 1980s. They were stored in proper archival facilities in a converted hangar at RAF West Malling, a former Royal Air Force station.

“They [the council] don’t know what they have,” says Brazier. “The value of having the work in Kent is a great deal more than the value of flogging them off.”

Ray-Jones, who was born in Wells, Somerset, had native connections, having spent early childhood within the Kent city of Tonbridge, and lots of of his images within the sale depict public gatherings from across the county, corresponding to May Queen celebrations in Chatham, a Dickens pageant in Broadstairs, and a magnificence contest in Margate. All had been taken throughout a two-year interval within the late Sixties when the photographer launched into a significant mission documenting the English at leisure. The collection, A Day Off, was posthumously revealed by Thames & Hudson in 1974, two years after his dying on the age of 31. Several photos from A Day Off seem within the Sworders public sale on 10 March, and a quantity are included in a present show at Tate Britain, Modern and Contemporary British Art, which runs till 17 May.

“His work helped elevate documentary photography into the realm of British art,” says Nicoletta Lambertucci, the curator of Modern and up to date British artwork at Tate. “It continues to resonate as an invaluable cultural record of a society in transition, made all the more poignant by the tragically short span of his life and career.”