[1] Jones documented facets of social history as diverse as the vanishing industrial working lives of the North East coalfields (Grafters), delinquent Afro-Caribbean youth in London (The Black House), hedonistic 1960s 'Swinging London'[2] with pictures of The Who early in their career, the 1963 race riots in Alabama, Soviet Leningrad, and remnants of a rural Britain now lost to history.
[6] While on tour and running an errand for Margot Fonteyn, he bought his first camera, a Leica 3C rangefinder, in 1958 and started taking photographs of the dancers and backstage life during the Australian leg of the circuit.
Dancers come alive in front of the curtain, but he wanted to snap the reality: the endless tedium of rehearsals in dusty church halls in the North East, the sheer misery of it all.
Commissioned assignments took him to New York City in 1962; Liverpool docks in 1963; the race riots in Birmingham, Alabama, USA, where he made portraits of both 'Bull' Connor, and Dr Martin Luther King in 1963; and Leningrad, USSR in 1964.
[16][5] Jones was commissioned by the Sunday Times Magazine in 1973 to document the Islington-based Harambee housing project for Afro-Caribbean youth (the name 'Harambee' is Swahili for 'pulling together').
The Sunday Times front cover article 'On the edge of the Ghetto'[17] resulted from his frequent visits to the dilapidated terraced house on Holloway Road, a refuge for troubled young black men which was run by a charismatic Caribbean migrant, Brother Herman Edwards.
[21] This first generation of Afro-Caribbean young people to be born in Britain experienced prejudice and disadvantage in education, employment and with the law, and Jones humanised what had been a one-sided news story.
[24] In his later career he covered assignments around the world, including Jamaica in 1978; the indigenes of the New Hebrides and Zaire in 1980; Tom Waits in New York, 1981; San Blas Islands in 1982; Ireland in 1984; Xian, China in 1985; Ladakh in northern India in 1994[25] and Bunker Hill, Kansas in 1996.
Martin Harrison's Young Meteors[28] associated Jones with other important British photographers including Don McCullin and Terence Donovan.