Colour photography didn’t begin with Ernst Haas but the legendary photographer Edward Steichen credited him with launching “a new epoch in photography”. Black and white photo-documentaries qualified him to join the Magnum agency in 1949 (invited by founding father Robert Capa), but he soon flooded it with colour.

Haas never fitted a single category and he left an archive revealing a man with a painter’s hand and a poet’s eye; this carefully curated, surprising exhibition exposes that range. It opens with the colour-drenched Route 66, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1968, which draws the eye into jagged puddles of colour, reflections of billboards and neon. And in the breathtaking black-and-white of Times Square, 1962, the eye rises through a hazy street scene, changing focuses and graphic patterns which long predate Idris Khan’s multi-layering effect.

Aside from such painterliness, Haas was also a sensitive portraitist. Albert Einstein was one of his most celebrated subjects — standing perplexed, in his office and frowning out in his garden. He caught people and stories everywhere: in London Street, 1951, a street-trader’s mirrors become windows on to the passers-by, and on the set of The Misfits in 1960, a bucking horse drags its rider’s feet off the ground in a pure Cartier Bresson “moment”.

Haas’s other trademark affinity is for abstraction. London Docks, 1951, is a bridge with documentary, with two boys leaning on railings by a ship’s hull daubed with calligraphy-like paint splashes. Perfectly composed, it perhaps inspired his photo-montage-like passion for the abstraction in torn posters (an unwitting pioneer of “street art”.) Wet oily roads fed his imagination with dizzy psychedelia, and the epic Street Impressions, Tokyo, 1984, like Route 66, perfectly matches his description of himself as “a painter in a hurry”.

Until 1 November. Information: 020 7224 4192, www.atlasgallery.com.