Tony Ray Jones - American colour 1962-1965

He referred to them as "isolated sketches", but the were part of his formative experience. Colour might have been considered vulgar, then ,and not the medium of serious photography, but for Tony Ray-Jones it expressed the excitement of the country in a way that black and white did not. "I found America a very colour-conscious country", he said. "Colour is very much part of theit culture, and they use it in crazy ways.
You look down Madison Avenue at lunchtime and the colours just vibrate. He 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 Fith Avenue, in Times Square, Chinatown and Little Italy he learned to extract individual moments from a crowded backdrop and to find order in the chaos of the street.
Based in New York, he made trips across the country ; west to Detroit, south to Florida ; all the time making colour pictures alongside black and white. "When i got back to England i found everything so grey that i did'nt see the point of shooting in colour. To me, Britain is very much a black and white country". Britain was where he made his reputation, but America, and particularly New York, was where he made the experiments that would inform it.
This small book of colour photographs shows something of what those experiments produced.