Born in Chicago, Jay King began taking photographs in 1962 at the city's Riverview Amusement Park. After completing a BA in history at the University of Wisconsin, Madison (1966) he embarked on a profession as a commercial photographer. In the meantime, as can be seen in his photographs of street scenes in Chicago from the late 1960s, King was developing his sensibility as a street photographer while drawing on the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank as models. Photographing ordinary activities and commonplace occurences in the neighborhood, he attempted to capture the variation in lifestyles and the ways in which different kinds of people coexisted.