The street where you lived
There are still a few weeks for anyone within striking distance of London to see the current exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery of the work of British photographer Roger Mayne (1929–2014). Mayne is remembered particularly for his images of street life – notably of young people – in London in the 1950s and 1960s. He is especially associated with this point in British history, when children still played in city streets, when local communities were tightly knit, and when the first generation to be known as teenagers were making their mark.
His most famous sequences of photographs was taken in West London’s Southam Street, which soon after he made the pictures was flattened to make way for Ernö Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower. The exhibition shows these images, as well as others taken in Leeds, and a group showing young workers in the Raleigh Cycle factory in Nottingham. Some of the images were used on the covers of Penguin and Pelican books, of which a selection are included too. One can see why Penguin chose Mayne's images: he nails his subjects decisively, time after time.
Photograph © Roger Mayne / Mary Evans Picture Library
Another group, which appeared in the magazine Architectural Design in September 1963, capture Sheffield’s Park Hill estate, which was designed in the early-1960s as a council estate in one huge building, by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, working in Sheffield Corporation’s City Architect’s department under J. L. Womersley. What’s striking about these images is the way they rewrite the rules of architectural photography. Instead of pristine buildings in a setting empty of human life, Mayne’s pictures have people everywhere – chatting on walkways, sauntering on pavements, playing outdoors. They’re refreshing and lively, in a way that so many photographs of new buildings are not.
The final part of the exhibition contains an installation, a whole exhibition in itself, called The British At Leisure. This was made for the Milan Triennale in 1964 and consists of 310 colour photographs projected on to screens, to the accompaniment of a specially written jazz score and the constant clacking and clunking of five Carousel slide projectors. Here are people playing every imaginable sport from cricket to cycling, people relaxing in parks and cafés, at the opera or art gallery, fishing, gardening, motoring, enjoying Christmas and November 5th, sunning themselves on the beach, sailing model boats, riding, showing dogs, and so on and on. It’s a kaleidoscope of British life in the early-1960s, and I was riveted.
This is a terrific exhibition of work by a man who insisted that photography is an art and who proved it in image after image, who portrayed a time in British history like no one else, and whose work endures for its ability, again and again, to capture decisive moments.
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The images are © Roger Mayne / Mary Evans Picture Library
The exhibition ends on 11 June.
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