Bill Ray (1936–2020) was an American photojournalist whose long career included twelve years of work for Life magazine spanning the 1960s.

His subjects ranged broadly from celebrities to international conflicts, social upheavals, and fads of the moment and he became known for the persistence and ingenuity he put into obtaining photos that possessed both immediacy and lasting artistic value.

[1][2] Encouraged by his mother, he adopted photography as a hobby at the age of eleven and within a year was developing and printing photos that he had taken with a medium format Speed Graphic camera that he had been given.

[4][note 1] When he was sixteen a local newspaper published a photo he had taken showing the last passenger train that would stop in his home town.

[note 2] The recognition Ray received for taking it helped him obtain a job in the Chicago office of United Press International later that year.

[3] While still free-lancing Ray took photos of jazz bassist, Charles Mingus at a club in Greenwich Village and Elvis Presley just before his departure to serve as an Army Private in Germany.

[8][9] A year later he did a photo shoot of Alan Freed's last television show as a payola scandal ended his career as a rock and roll disk jockey.

[13] A year later he took an arresting photo of a Beatles fan as the foursome arrived in Los Angeles for a west coast concert tour (shown at left).

"[note 4] That year he also produced a photo essay on the founder of Japan's largest consumer electronics company, Konosuke Matsushita.

[3] In October of the same year, Ray was in Sikkim to photograph Chinese Red Army soldiers patrolling the Tibetan border of that Indian province.

[17] In 1966 Ray produced a photo essay in a small Ohio town from which a relatively large number of young men had been sent to fight in Vietnam.

"[18] Before going to Massillon Ray made a photo essay showing the Watts section of Los Angeles as a follow-up to the previous summer's riots.

The accompanying description said, "Suddenly, unbelievably, Soviet tanks were in the streets of Prague, and the brief idyll of liberation, the brave rebirth of national pride and expectation were at an end... Utterly astounded by the treachery and admonished by their leaders to offer no resistance, the Czech people could only gather with their flags in anguished crowds and hurl threats and a pitiful defiance against the steel of the invaders.

[24] Interspersed with his celebrity coverage were special-interest features such as photographs of endangered wildlife taken during a three-month assignment in 1970 and a 1972 photo essay on the activities of a thirteen-year-old boy in Manhattan.

In addition he photographed Ray Charles at Carnegie Hall (1966) and both on- and off-field photos of the first Super Bowl (1967) in collections that Life decided not to publish.

A critic noted that he was as yet only 22 years old and while the show seemed premature, there was "enough imaginative work to indicate that a new and refreshing talent has appeared on the photojournalistic scene.

[11] An example he gave of the latter situation was the Kennedy-Onassis wedding when he found himself drenched by heavy rainfall and in danger of electric shock from his web strobe.

[11] In a 2014 interview he said he developed his skill at composition, at capturing his subjects' expressions and body language, and at handling ambient lighting by studying works at local art museums.

Soon after the dramatic escalation of the war in Vietnam in the early months of 1965 he photographed the big guns of an American light cruiser as they opened up on Viet Cong targets and brought his cameras into the cockpits during bombing runs by carrier-based warplanes (and once urged a pilot to fly so low that it skimmed the water).

"[13][note 7] Nonetheless, as Grace Glueck, a critic for The New York Times wrote, Ray's work was "in and of the moment, but it reaffirms that photojournalism is an art all its own.