Able Was I Ere I Saw Elba (Japanese Recreational Clay-
works), 1985
Further Reading
Geldzahler, Henry.Making It New: Essays, Interviews, and
Talks. San Diego: Harcourt Brace & Co., 1994.
Hughes, Robert. ‘‘The Great Permitter: A Vast Retrospec-
tive Celebrates the Whitmanesque Profusion of Robert
Rauschenberg.’’Time27 October 1997: 108.
Kotz, Mary Lynn.Rauschenberg/Art and Life. New York:
Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 1990.
Steinberg, Leo.Encounters with Rauschenberg. Houston:
The Menil Collection and Chicago, University of Chi-
cago Press, 2000.
O’Sullivan, Michael. ‘‘Rauschenberg’s Groundbreaking
Combinations.’’Washington Post, 19 January 2001.
Rauschenberg, Robert, Susan Davidson, Trisha Brown,
and Ruth E. Fine.Robert Rauschenberg: A Retrospec-
tive. New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum,
1997.
Tomkins, Calvin.Off the Wall: Robert Rauschenberg and
the Art World of Our Time. Garden City, New York:
Doubleday & Co., 1980.TONY RAY-JONES
British
Tony Ray-Jones was one of the most important
English photographers of his generation through
the visual quality of his work and the influence it
had on young photographers, including his fellow
Brit Martin Parr. Ray-Jones first emerged as a
photographer in London when little was known
about the medium’s past, aside from some key
images from the nineteenth century. There were
no galleries showing photographs and very few
books. In 1960, when he began to take pictures,
Ray-Jones had no sense that he was unwittingly
following a very British tradition of Social Docu-
mentary. In the 1930s, Humphrey Spender (1910–)
had worked as a photographer for a project called
Worktownfor Mass Observation, which was study-
ing the lives of ordinary people in Bolton, a North-
ern city. In 1936, Bill Brandt (1904–1983) had
published The English at Home, a book which
documented the social divisions of British society.
Later, in the 1940s and 1950s, Brandt was to work
for Picture Post magazine, the chief outlet for
photographers who favored a popular audience.
He also proved to be a strong influence on Ray-
Jones, possibly because Brandt’s brother taught at
what then was called the London School (now Col-
lege) of Printing, where Ray-Jones went in 1957
to study Graphic Design. Other photographers
he came to admire were Henri Cartier-Bresson
(1908–), Brassai (1899–1984), and Robert Frank
(1924–)—all Europeans who managed to infuse
their images with whimsy and a sometimes sad but
frequently engaging honesty. Ray-Jones wanted to
be like one of his literary role models, George
Orwell (1903–1950), and bring poetry to documen-
tary or authenticity to the dignity and strangeness
of 1960s street life. Having the attitude ‘‘take one
for the man and one for myself,’’ Ray-Jones was a
working photographer who wanted absolute con-
trol over how his pictures would be seen. That
attitude created problems in the 1960s. As a com-
mercial magazine photographer, he could provide a
convincing portfolio of published work and short
stories, and he also took portraits for major maga-
zines. Yet Ray-Jones wanted something else—to
show his own vision of the world as a place of
possibility where, with a camera, he could trans-
form the mundane into the meaningful.
A seminal influence on Ray-Jones’s development
was Alexey Brodovitch (1898–1971), little known
as a photographer but famous as a magazine Art
Director and designer. Brodovitch, a White Rus-
sian emigre ́to Paris in 1920 and then to the United
States in 1930, was Art Director ofHarper’s Bazaar
and ran the Design Laboratory, an open-ended
teaching situation that attracted the best and
brightest. At the time Ray-Jones first met Brodo-
vich, classes were held in the Richard Avedon
(1923–) studio in Manhattan. Brodovitch was
admired greatly by designers and photographers
and was mentor to many. He liked Ray-Jones’s
work, which was then a fusion of photography’s
old (European) world and the radical new of theRAY-JONES, TONY