Roger Mayne

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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