American Colour 1962–1965 is a carefully edited selection of previously unpublished colour photographs from the earliest period of Tony Ray-Jones's work. Selected by Liz Jobey from the extensive archives at Bradford's National Media Museum, the book gathers experiments that informed his later practice.
 
Ray-Jones arrived in America in 1961 on a Yale scholarship to study graphic arts and returned to England four years later. America taught him to be a photographer. Amid New York's street parades, on Fifth Avenue, in Times Square, Chinatown and Little Italy, he learned to isolate moments from crowded backgrounds and find order in street chaos. Based in New York, he travelled across the country, west to Detroit and south to Florida, continually making colour photographs alongside the black-and-white images for which he became known.
 
He later called these early photographs "isolated sketches", clearly part of his formative experience. Colour was then considered vulgar and unsuitable for serious photography, but for Ray-Jones it expressed America's excitement in ways black and white could not.
 
"I found America a very colour-conscious country. Colour is a major part of its culture, used in crazy ways. Look down Madison Avenue at lunchtime and the colours simply vibrate."
 
Tony Ray-Jones (1941–1972) was born in Somerset and educated at Christ's Hospital and the London School of Printing, where he won his Yale scholarship. During his master's studies, he spent increasing time in New York, studying and working with Alexey Brodovitch and befriending Joel Meyerowitz and Garry Winogrand. He worked as a designer at CBS Records and art director for magazines before becoming a full-time freelance photographer. Returning to England in late 1965, he made the photographs published after his early death from leukaemia as A Day Off: An English Journal (1974).