Clara Enola Jones

About

Clara Enola Jones is a Design Historian with a focus on 20th and 21st-century visual culture. Clara’s research interprets and uses photography to reveal the broader range of social and cultural dynamics created through picture-taking. Her work particularly emphasises the journey of an image after it’s taken, including its archiving, display, and storage processes. 

Graduating with a BA Honors in History from Royal Holloway, Clara completed works on representation and identity through photography. Her BA dissertation is titled ‘Representations of the Welsh Working Class: Through the Eyes of Tish Murtha, David Hurn, and Martin Parr’.

Clara’s MA dissertation is titled ‘Cheap, Easy and Democratic, Polaroid-the 60 Second Wonder’. This body of work explored the Polaroid in all its authenticity, aiming to refocus and shift perceptions surrounding more amateur and vernacular forms of photography. This dissertation argued that the ubiquitous and common hold as much significance as polished and refined pieces of work, with snapshot photography working to reconcile personal and mass identity. The Polaroid acted as a device to capture the truth, allowing the most joyful and authentic moments to be captured, subsequently bypassing the endless poverty porn and stylised photographic examples of the ‘everyday’ that have become monopolised within institutions. 

Clara frequently shoots on Polaroid and creates material pieces such as collages and photo transfers which allows her to gain an extra-hands-on understanding of the historical sources she works with, developing unique skills that can be established within the practice of Design History.