Tony Ray-Jones

American Colour 1962–1965 
A digital edition of Tony Ray-Jones' previously unpublished colour work.

American Colour 1962–1965 is a carefully edited selection Tony Ray-Jones' colour photographs from the earliest period of his work. Taken from the extensive archives held at the National Media Museum in Bradford, this book brings together the early experiments that would inform his later work. 

Ray-Jones arrived in America in 1961 on a scholarship to Yale to study graphic art and he returned to England four years later. It was in America that he learned to be a photographer. Among New York's street parades, on Fifth Avenue, in Times Square, Chinatown and Little Italy he learned to extract individual moments from a crowded backdrop—to find order in the chaos of the street. At the time colour was considered vulgar and not the medium of serious photography, but for Ray-Jones it expressed the excitement of America in a way that black-and-white could not. LINK mappeditions