During the winter of 1972-73, the photographer Jon Naar, who has died aged 97, walked the streets and rode the subways of New York, taking shots of spray-can graffiti. At the time these displays were generally considered to amount to little more than vandalism: the mayor had recently declared war on them.

Jon’s pictures were distilled into the book that made his name, The Faith of Graffiti (1974). Complementing an essay by Norman Mailer, he used his images to acknowledge graffiti as a distinct, modern subculture in a troubled and changing city, and its protagonists as marginalised youth. Mailer’s framing of graffiti as acceptable expression may go too far for some, but Jon’s photographs remain a document of New York history, establishing his reputation as an astute and arresting chronicler of American street art and its contexts.

Jon had been commissioned to undertake the project by the designer Mervyn Kurlansky, who had come up with the idea. Their preferred title for the book was Watching My Name Go By. This came from a remark by a young graffiti writer about the pleasure of seeing the “tag” he had created – usually a nickname plus a number, often that from the street or block where he lived – flash past on a subway train. Although the title was replaced for the American edition with that of Mailer’s essay, it was retained for publication in Britain.

Jon, who was born in London but by then had become a US citizen, went on to co-write and photograph the bestselling Design for a Limited Planet (1976), which explored the use of renewable energy in urban and rural homes. Later books included Design for a Livable Planet (1990), which urged readers to see that environmental issues were too important to leave to governments, while recommending methods of peacefully influencing policy, and This Land Is Your Land (1993), a guide to North America’s endangered ecosystems, co-written with his son, Alex.

Other work ranged from reportage to portraiture for designers and magazines including Vogue. Subjects included Andy Warhol, whom he shot at the Silver Factory in 1965 for New York Magazine. Jon looked back over his photography in Getting the Picture (2006), and his last retrospective came at the New Jersey State Museum, near his home in Trenton, in 2013.

Brought up in Hendon, north-west London, Jon was the son of Abraham Naar, whose Sephardic forebears had resettled from the Netherlands, and his wife, Dorine, a Jewish refugee from Belarus who had arrived in England aged three. Abraham, a civil servant who had served as a king’s messenger in the first world war and been appointed MBE, became the borough’s first Jewish mayor.

After leaving Mill Hill school at 16, Jon studied at the Universities of Paris and Vienna. When the second world war broke out, he was reading psychology, German and French at London University.

The photographer Jon Naar in 2012. Photograph: Hank Gans

In 1941 he was commissioned into the Royal Artillery, and was quickly assigned to intelligence duties. By the summer he was attached to Australian troops fighting Vichy French forces in Lebanon and Syria.

There his adventures included masquerading in Vichy territory as a Swiss journalist and a dangerous mission into no man’s land to call on French soldiers to surrender. “I was able to deliver the first couple of lines of my prepared ‘French comrades, we have come to liberate you’ speech, but the French became even more enraged because they mistook me for a De Gaullist and redoubled their fire.” Later that year, interviewing Jewish refugees near the Turkish border, he recorded early reports of mass killings in eastern Europe by German death squads.

In 1943, after teaching at an intelligence school in Egypt, Jon joined the Special Operations Executive local headquarters, on the staff of its Albanian section. SOE was responsible for carrying out sabotage and encouraging resistance in enemy-occupied territory, which Jon facilitated first from Cairo and later from Bari, southern Italy. By the end of the war he was a major engaged in counter-intelligence work. Having shared the hopes of many that victory would mean more than the defeat of Nazi Germany, he considered running for parliament as a Labour MP.

In the event, he married Ellen Hartt, an officer of the American OSS (a forerunner of the CIA), and moved to the US. Settling in New York, he took an MA in political science and international relations at Columbia University. He worked as a medical science writer and editor, and then in advertising, marketing and management, before embarking in the mid-1960s on a career as a professional photographer.

Each of Jon’s marriages, to Ellen, Ruth Kurle and Beverly Russell, ended in divorce. Alex, his son from his second marriage, survives him, along with his grandson, Axel.

• Jon (Leonard John) Naar, photographer, born 5 May 1920; died 30 November 2017