SWPP - Keeping Up With The Jones’s

Imagemaker talks to The Societies’ CEO Phil Jones and his director wife Juliet about the past, the present and the future of this thriving family business:

“When Phil took over the SWPP ten years ago I asked him what he really wanted to achieve.  He said: ‘A better standard of photography worldwide’. I hope some may think that has been achieved” – Juliet Jones

Perhaps it’s all about DNA.
Who gets to inherit the photo-gene? Is it really in the blood?
Phil Jones’s father was a photographer – so his next in line was born into the profession.
“I was brought up with back garden washing lines almost permanently resplendent with black and white prints wafting in the breeze” Phil tells Imagemaker. “My bedroom was next door to my dad’s makeshift darkroom, complete with mandatory red light outside and an all-pervading, yet strangely intoxicating smell of fixer.

Take me into a D&P shop today and it’s pure nostalgia; the chemical ‘fragrance’ is always reminiscent of my childhood.”

Phil studied photography at Birkenhead College before landing a job in photo-sales in London.

“Acquiring sales experience was an important factor in my career” he explains. “So when I became a professional photographer it meant I already had grounding in sales. A number of photographers founder today because, despite creative ability, they have inadequate business acumen.”

Phil worked for his father before launching his own ‘Pictures Galore’ business focussing on weddings, family portraiture and picture framing.

But tough economic times in the early Nineties linked to ongoing battles with high rents and rates forced him to generate extra income as a medical photographer at a north Wales hospital.

“I did this for four years and from a photographic perspective it was the most interesting job I ever had” he notes. “It was a real challenge. Surgeons would use my images and videography in lectures to medical students. Plus, it was quite an adrenalin rush to know that hundreds of medical experts from across the globe were going to turn up for their ‘best practice’ seminar conventions at which all the videography was my responsibility. In addition my work was often used as pictorial evidence in litigation cases.”

Then he joined the Master Photographers Association (MPA), the SWPP and The Guild of Wedding Photographers. “I was keen to improve my own work, make my images more saleable” he recalls. “I had become a regional chairman at the MPA and I had started going to the annual conventions of the Wedding and Portrait Photographers International (WPPI) in the States. Those trips proved to be a turning point in my career.

At these events I became close friends with photo-heroes like Monte Zucker – and I always came back to the UK inspired.”

And it was a chance meeting at a WPPI event that led to Phil taking over the SWPP.

“I heard that the SWPP owner Derek Avery might be interested in selling the organisation and I let it be known that I might be a buyer”, he says. “I didn’t have much money in 1999 but we shook hands on a deal that enabled me to pay over a few years.”

When Phil took over the SWPP membership stood at 256. A decade later the organisation, now named The Societies (incorporating the SWPP) has close to 7,000 members - 1500 of them internationally based – with an average of 6 new members joining every day.

Says Phil: “When I took the reins I knew we had to rebrand, create a professionally produced and meaningful magazine and develop a world-class seminar programme. I had to increase members and then make sure they stayed.”

Today the Rhyl-based business runs Europe’s largest annual photographic convention – which in January 2010 will boast 150 seminar speakers from across the globe, including ‘international imaging heavyweights’ Jerry Ghionis, Kevin Kubota, Charlie Waite, Mark Cleghorn and Trevor and Faye Yerbury.

In addition a groundbreaking 250 trade exhibitors, will be showcasing goods and services at the Novotel, Hammersmith.