Abiriba (Igbo) Photographs

Gwilym Iwan Jones was born on the 3rd of May 1904 in South Africa. He spent some of his childhood in Chile before coming to England where he read history at St. John’s, Leatherhead and won a Welsh scholarship to Jesus College, Oxford. After completing his degree at Oxford he joined the Colonial Service and served as an Administrative Officer in Nigeria from 1926 to 1946. Most of his service was in the Eastern Region where he became District Officer for Bende and adjacent divisions of what was then Owerri Province. During this time he developed a profound interest in the society, history and arts of the peoples of southeastern Nigeria. In the 1930s Jones acquired a Roloflex camera and developed a system for immediate developing which produced negatives of such high quality that they continue to produce excellent prints six decades later. It was at this time that he built up the extraordinary photographic record of Southeastern Nigerian culture of which this archive provides a sample