Tony Ray-Jones took this picture at the Windsor horse show in 1967. He was 25, and engaged in an all-consuming personal project to capture the essence of “the English way of life … before it becomes more Americanised”. A precocious talent, Ray-Jones had won a scholarship from the London School of Printing to study at Yale School of Art when he was 19. He befriended the freewheeling young stars of American photography, Garry Winogrand and Joel Meyerowitz, was mentored by Richard Avedon and returned home in 1965 with notebooks full of strategy. “Get more involved (talk to people),” began one typical list of these notes to self. “Stay with the subject matter (be patient). See if everything in the background relates to the subject matter. NO MIDDLE DISTANCE.”

With these principles in mind, Ray-Jones took himself off in a camper van in search of Englishness. He found a good deal of it on beaches – windbreaks and frigid paddling and Thermoses balanced on shingle – and at all levels of pageantry, from Glyndebourne and the Chelsea flower show to local beauty parades and fun fairs. This photograph, in which the horse takes more interest in the cafe than the cafe takes in the horse, was typical of his eye.

Tony Ray-Jones died of a sudden and aggressive leukaemia in 1972, his project unfinished. His pictures had achieved a significant following among younger photographers. Among them was Martin Parr, then a student at Manchester Polytechnic, who was “enthralled and excited” by Ray-Jones’s perfectly realised comedies of English manners and took inspiration from them in his own vocation. Parr includes this photograph in a book of Ray-Jones’s English pictures and an exhibition at his foundation. The book stands, he hopes, as a definitive tribute to Ray-Jones’s “ability to make complex images in which every element falls into place”.

The English Seen by Tony Ray-Jones is at Martin Parr Foundation, Bristol, Wednesday to 21 December. An accompanying book, Tony Ray-Jones, is out this month (RRB Photobooks / Martin Parr Foundation, £48)