Roger Mayne

What he saved for his family

As an artist nears the end of his or her life, in addition to working through the inevitable questions of how the estate will be managed in the future, it is often the case that the artist sets aside works for family, friends, and loved ones, so that they don’t get overlooked, inadvertently sold off, or lost in the shuffle. And in the years before he died in 2014, the British photographer Roger Mayne did just this, working with gallerist Tom Gitterman to box up a selection of the last vintage prints from some of his favorite and most noted images from the 1950s, which became known as Ann's Box (for his wife Ann Jellicoe and their family). This tightly-edited show is made up of works from that personal cache, the prints having now drifted down the generations.

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West London's Working-Class

Roger Mayne’s pictures of London in the 1950s capture a city on the verge of change. In his images, you can see the destruction of the Second World War and the dullness of austerity mixing with the dynamism of migration and the rise of youth cultures. He shows a city that is alive, where the tarmac, the pavements, and the houses are part of a living culture that will come into full bloom in the decades to come.

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Joyful photos of London youth  culture in the 50s and 60s: Teenage kicks

Strolling through North West London one weekend in 1956, British photographer Roger Mayne (1929–2014) happened upon Southam Street in the neighbourhood now known as Notting Hill. Captivated by the locals who had turned the street into their playground, Mayne found what he had been searching for – a community he could chronicle for the sheer joy of making art...  

“Because he lived in the neighbourhood, he saw many of his subjects frequently and they trusted him. The candid nature of his images comes out of his inherent honesty and decency.”...

“The photographer’s power to select…makes it possible for photography to be an art,” Mayne continued. “Whether it is good art depends on the power and truth of the artist’s statement.”

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SNAPSHOT: Goalie, Brindley Road (1956)

..Mayne's photographs capture neighbourhoods still in war's shadow, but filled with the energy of the "sidewalk ballet"...

Roger Mayne’s photographs of 1950s London are an observant societal study of a city in transition.

His pictures of children at play and amid rubble-strewn lots and graffiti-covered walls are portraits of resilience

Roger Mayne (1929-2014) was a major British photographer of the postwar era. 

The London Roger Mayne encountered in the mid-1950s was beat up and bombed out, but as his images prove, still full of life.

Mayne is wonderfully alert to the skittering dynamics of children at play and their unself-conscious grace while at rest.
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“My approach is visual rather than storytelling—I am a documentary rather than a journalistic photographer,” he said. “I have always had a habit of seeing and looking.”
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One of the greatest living British photographers, Mayne is best known for his pictures of working-class children playing and hanging about on London's gritty Southam Street, made between 1956 and 1961.
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Roger Mayne (born 1929) is one of the few important British photographers of the last half of the 20th century.
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Mayne's genius, like Levitt's, was his ability to freeze spontaneity without sapping its spirit.
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The pictures recall William Klein's and Helen Levitt's American street photography from the same years; Mayne was just as much a master of the decisive moment.
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Images of working class Londoners and children playing soccer in the street convey a sense of immediacy.
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