One of the by-products of looking through archives is a kind of artificial clairvoyance: you know what is going to happen next. Sandwiched between some loose papers in the archives of the British photographer Tony Ray-Jones at the Museum of Photography, Film & Television in Bradford was a page from one of those old-fashioned desk calendars, the sort that gets torn off as each day goes by. A large red figure eight and the full date, 7/8/64, Wednesday July 8 1964; the reversed day and month indicated America. On the flip side were a few scribbled notes about how best to expose Pan-X film "for detail". Most of the other sheets contained lists, scribbled in swift capitals: "Some Story Ideas: Sunnyside Colony, Queens (German folk dancing etc), Festival of Flowers (call Buddhist temple), Gypsies and Gypsy weddings, Abyssinian Church Uptown - Fashion show (negro audience), People trapped in small environment - elevators (before door closes), Invisible people - shoe-shiners in Gnd Central, Women who live out of bags, People in Supermarkets - stop them and shoot yell stop. Bus terminals - Make people automatons."  Among "some places to photograph" were Idlewild airport, Fulton fish market on the Lower East Side, East Harlem, Chinatown, St Christopher's Arena "midgets backstage", Central Park and Coney Island. It was the hectic schedule of a young British photographer in his first year in New York. The lists aren't dated, but they must have been made before the end of 1963, when Idlewild airport was renamed to commemorate the death of John F Kennedy. By this time Ray-Jones would have been in America for two years, studying for a Master of Fine Arts in graphic design at Yale. After graduating in the summer of 1964, he found a short-lived job as an art director at CBS records, but he was determined to become a photographer. The country he had left behind was still recovering from the second world war, but New York was buzzing with newness. He kept his programme for the US premiere of Stockhausen's Originale in September 1964 at the Judson Hall, with "action music" by the artist Nam June Paik and poetry by Allen Ginsberg, just as he kept scraps of paper on which he'd jotted down music stores offering cheap deals on jazz: 50 cents off Horace Silver's Blowin' The Blues Away at Sam Goody's, a dollar off Ray Charles on Atlantic at Korvette's, half-price Blue Note albums at Kenny's.  "You know, Tony loved America intensely, and he loved it for its music," Joel Meyerowitz said. "He was feverish about music and photography. But he was very English about it, always muttering a lot, 'We've got to keep working ...' He was incredibly impatient."  Meyerowitz is now one of America's most famous photographic artists, but 40 years ago he spent two years of intense friendship with Ray-Jones, roaming the streets and taking photographs. "Every Saturday there would be ethnic parades, St Patrick's day, Polish day, Columbus day, veterans' day. We used these parades as a laboratory. We learned to be invisible. We learned how to shape pictures that were not about an event but about an observation."  The streets of New York represented fertile territory for documentary photographers, from Weegee and William Klein to Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand - a new generation of photographers whose aim, in the words of John Szarkowski at the Museum of Modern Art, "has been not to reform life but to know it". Ray-Jones and Meyerowitz were fired up by what was going on around them. "Bresson was very important to both of us," Meyerowitz said. "We were in love with him, and with Robert Frank." And then there was Winogrand, who made "the freest, loosest, open-ended, open-hearted, generous pictures about life".  "Those were precious years," Meyerowitz said. "Every day was a discovery. It was wonderful having a partner who said, 'We've got to keep working. We can't let this crap that we're producing keep us down.' We loved each other in the way that two guys on the edge of discovery love each other, and we had the raw medium between us." Which is why the discovery of the calendar page generated a sudden poignancy. Because with it came the realisation that on July 8 1964, Ray-Jones was a month past his 23rd birthday, burning with plans for the future, and in less than 10 years he would be dead. His photographic career spanned little more than a decade. His five years in America were followed by five more in England, from 1966 to 1971. There was a brief return to America, teaching in San Francisco, before he fell ill and returned to London, where he died of leukaemia in March 1972. "There's a thing about those people," Meyerowitz said, "those people who have brilliant creative minds and who died at 30. They did it in those 10 years - the clock is running and they're burning their metabolism at a certain rate. There was that sense with Tony."  Ray-Jones was born in Somerset in 1941. His father, Raymond Ray-Jones, was an engraver whose work was collected in the British Museum and the V&A. He died before Tony was a year old, and his mother with her three sons moved in with her parents and worked as a physiotherapist. Ray-Jones went to school at Christ's Hospital, in West Sussex, then enrolled on a graphic design course at the London School of Printing, where Rolf Brandt, Bill Brandt's brother, encouraged his photography. He left England on a scholarship for Yale in 1961 before "the 60s" as we know it had even begun. He came back in 1966 to find London swinging, but the rest of Britain still clearly divided by class and tradition. He left behind only one book, but his role as both inspiration and an irritant to a British photographic community which, as far as he was concerned, was barely conscious, compared with America's, ensured his place in the history of British photography. He inspired the generation that followed him to observe the society around them, as its values shifted under Margaret Thatcher.  In the summer of 1966 he came across a Country Life book of Old English Customs. The description of traditional rural pastimes excited him and he began to conceive of a book about the English. The last such subjective survey by a photographer had been Bill Brandt's The English At Home, published in 1936. It was time for an update.  Back in London that autumn, he met Anna Coates, an art student from St Helens. They moved into a flat in Gloucester Place, where Ray-Jones built a darkroom and, amid visitors from America, including Meyerowitz, Winogrand, the jazz pianist Horace Silver, John Szarkowski, continued to develop his new project. A Day Off - An English Journal, a collection of photographs he took between 1967 and 1970, was published posthumously in 1974.  He and Anna bought a VW camper van and started to make weekend trips. "We drove off to the seaside, or to a festival," she said. "Tony did a lot of research with the English Folklore Society, with various tourist boards, with visitors' information centres at various seaside resorts. He plotted things out. He was quite well organised."  In 1964, at Yale, Ray-Jones had attended a lecture by Walker Evans, who showed not his own photographs but his collection of American postcards. Ray-Jones now began to collect postcards of England, including the rude seaside postcards by Donald McGill. He made lists of books to read, from The Butlin Story, to Veblen's The Theory Of The Leisure Class, to Jane Austen's unfinished novel, Sanditon. His calendar of upcoming events included women's bowls in Bournemouth in July, Britain's baby of the year in Blackpool in August, Carnival Week in Skegness in September. Almost every resort had a beauty contest.  Meyerowitz was impressed by the change in his friend. "When we met up in London in 1966, he seemed a little more rooted," he said. "To me, Britain had the impoverished mentality of a postwar generation. There was a tightness and a rigidity in the culture. Tony had come back and was able to mock those mores and that lifestyle. It was perfect timing for him to return."  In the mid-to-late 1960s, England's seaside resorts were filled with families taking their annual holidays. Ray-Jones captured the chaos of these groups - barefoot children wandering off down the sands, pensioners wrapped up in motley against the winds, young couples in awkward embraces, hamfisted fathers with their toddlers, chips and ice-cream and beer and litter, and everything happening at the same time in a choreography that sent the eye wandering off to the farthest edges of the picture and back again. The English seaside in black and white can be a grim place. But in the gestures of the people, Ray-Jones captured a whole range of human emotions; the lascivious tongue licking round the mouth of a spivvy-looking judge at a beauty contest in Southport; the gentle embrace of a young couple on a boat trip around Beachy Head, of which only the photographer among the rest of the holiday-makers on board seems aware; the joyless couple at Great Yarmouth, slumped under grimy fake palm trees, and, in the far left of the picture, the back of an unlit neon sign that reads JOYLAND in reverse.  America had been a search: for a style, for a subject, for a means of self-expression that went beyond the neatly crafted magazine photograph. His most successful pictures have this strong, multilayered architecture, built up by the passage of people and events within the frame. There is a tension between control and the lack of it; between the structure of the picture and the chance encounters that undermine it.  By 1968 he was ready to show his work to publishers, but London was not prepared. Fashion and advertising photographers were profiting from the "youthquake". There were new magazines and new products, particularly for teenagers and women. There were Sunday colour supplements. But most photography books (with the exception of Brandt) came from America. "No one was putting photographs up on walls and saying 'This is Art', as they were already doing in America," Anna Ray-Jones said. "And I think Tony brought that vision. But I think that was an alien view at the time, apart from a few enlightened people."  Creative Camera, launched at the beginning of 1968, was dedicated to publishing personal portfolios and critical writing on photography. It was owned by Colin Osman, a photography enthusiast who owned and published Racing Pigeon magazine, and was based in his offices in Doughty Street. It was into this den of pigeon fanciers and photographers that a "frizzy-haired guy with a Fu Manchu moustache" walked with a yellow box under his arm and told editor Bill Jay, "Your magazine's shit, but I can see you're trying. You just don't know enough, so I am here to help you." It was Tony Ray-Jones. The box contained pictures from America and for his proposed book.  Jay was impressed by the pictures and published some of them in the October issue. He and Ray-Jones became friends and combatants in the battle to raise the British consciousness about photography. Ray-Jones insisted Jay go with him to New York, where he planned to show the dummy of his English book to American publishers. They stayed at the Chelsea Hotel, and Jay met a whole roster of American photographers, including Winogrand, Frank, Meyerowitz and Arbus. But Ray-Jones received little interest in his book.  In the spring of 1969, some 54 of his photographs - entitled The English Seen - made up part of a group show of four photographers, Ray-Jones, Enzo Ragazzini, Dorothy Bohm and Don McCullin, at the ICA. It was the first photography exhibition the institute had held. Sue Davies, who two years later founded the Photographers' Gallery in London, was working there at the time. "Everybody in the ICA thought photography was naff. But after that hundreds of people came. It was so refreshing. Most of the stuff at the ICA had been very esoteric, quite elitist, quite hard. Then other photographers came, asking, 'Can you show my work?' That's really what inspired me to think of starting a place for professional photographers to show their work properly."  By the time of the ICA show, Ray-Jones had a more subtle understanding of his subject: "I have tried to show the sadness and the humour in a gentle madness that prevails in a people. The situations are sometimes ambiguous and unreal, and the juxtaposition of elements seemingly unrelated, and yet the people are real. This, I hope, helps to create a feeling of fantasy. Photography can be a mirror and reflect life as it is, but I also think that perhaps it is possible to walk, like Alice, through a Looking Glass, and find another kind of world with the camera."  In 1970 he was offered a teaching job at the San Francisco Art Institute. He needed "an American breather", his wife said, and they left for the west in 1971. He found teaching frustrating, but worked hard on stories for both American and British magazines, and experimented with colour for his own work. "We had intended to move to Los Angeles because Tony decided he wanted to go into films," Anna Ray-Jones explained. "I don't know what this transition would have really been like, but he decided he would study cinematography, and he was admitted to the Cal-Arts, into the school of cinema there. He became ill at the end of 1971 and it was apparent that something was very wrong. So it put the kibosh on all kinds of plans. And then he had to come home." He flew back to London on March 10 1972 and died three days later.  Last summer in Arles, Martin Parr, a guest curator of the photography festival there, showed a small group of Ray-Jones prints, a preview of a much larger exhibition that opens, accompanied by a new book, at the Bradford musem later this month. More than any other photographer in the generation that followed Ray-Jones, Parr's work reflects his influence. He first saw Ray-Jones's photographs in 1970, when Bill Jay gave a lecture at Manchester Polytechnic, where Parr was a student. "His pictures were about England. They had that contrast, that seedy eccentricity, but they showed it in a very subtle way. They have an ambiguity, a visual anarchy. They showed me what was possible."  The recent history of photography in Britain is still being compiled and argued over. There is no doubt as to Ray-Jones's influence on the development of what came to be called "independent" British photography during the 1970s, but the degree of its importance is debated. To Jay, "He galvanised a lot of young photographers. A myth was created about the 'independent artist'. It was created by people coming out of art colleges, absorbing the aura of the pure artist. You can exaggerate Tony's influence. The fact is that he wasn't there." For David Hurn, a Magnum photographer and a friend of Jay and Ray-Jones, the "myth that has grown up, that Tony brought American photography to Britain [is] nonsense. These people were known about. I had a big flat in Bayswater. By the mid-1960s Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Winogrand, had all been to stay. The idea that photography in Britain wouldn't have happened without Tony is wrong."  But from an American perspective, Britain lacked an original voice in photography during that period, and Ray-Jones stood out. "There semed to be no precedent in England for work like that," John Szarkowski wrote, in answer to an email. "Of course everyone in my country knew and revered Brandt, and respected Roger Mayne, but the surprising thing about Ray-Jones was that he had a different idea of what subject matter was possible for serious photography. It did not have to be heroic or poetic in any overt sense: it could be on the surface as tedious or as bland as our real tedious and bland lives usually are, and the photographs might still be compelling."  · Tony Ray-Jones, by Russell Roberts, is published by Boot at £29.95. A Gentle Madness: The Photographs Of Tony Ray-Jones (1941-72) opens at the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television in Bradford on October 15. A one-day conference, What Happened Here, Photography In Britain Since 1968, will be held at the NMPFT on October 14. Tickets: creativecamera.org.uk
His work spanned just a decade - he died aged 30 - but with his striking 1960s images of Britons at play, Tony Ray-Jones helped change the face of British photography for ever. By Liz Jobey.