Vintage print on Agfa Brovira paper without borders. Colin Jones's first photographs, such as this one, are often on a thick, textured Agfa Brovira photographic paper with no borders.

Signed on the reverse and inscribed "Tower Hill London 1959".

Traces of glue on the back of the present work suggest that it was once mounted to board for an exhibition.

Colin Jones's earliest works date from around 1959-61 when he was still a dancer at the Royal Ballet. Small, and in a variety of sizes, they are often on a heavy-weight textured paper and have a quite different feel from his later work. The Hyman Collection includes several of these works. In contrast to the panoramic feel of much of his later work,with its exploration of the relationship between people and their environment, in these early photographs the focus is often on the intimacy of the foreground subject.

The present photograph is reproduced full page in Colin Jones major book, Grafters (Phaidon, 2002), where it opens the first section entitled "Life". It the book it is dated 1961, although the back of the photograph is annotated 1959.

The subject of this picture is a celebrated street performer, an escapologist, whose act was to be tied in chains and then free himself. Jones captures the moment that a Christian evangelist walked past bearing a sign referring to the Wrath of the Lord.

We are grateful to Colin Jones for his assistance in cataloguing this picture.