Roger Mayne (5 May 1929 – 7 June 2014) was an English photographer, best known for his documentation of the children of Southam Street, London.[1]
Life and work
Born in
Cambridge, Mayne studied Chemistry at
Balliol College,
Oxford University. Here he became interested in
photographic processing, and met
Hugo van Wadenoyen, a key figure in British photography's break with
pictorialism. On graduating in 1951 Mayne contributed pictures to Picture Post, and was an occasional film stills photographer. In the early 1950s he made photographic portraits of many residents in the artist's-colony town of
St. Ives, Cornwall. He operated very much in an aesthetic vacuum, struggling to find any coherent tradition of British photography to follow. In 1956 he had a one-man show of his portraits at the
ICA (UK), and
George Eastman House (US). By 1957 he was established as a freelance photographer for London magazines and book-jacket designers.
With some financial and limited curatorial security established, he began to look for a significant personal project. He found it in the street life of Southam Street in Notting Dale (now often considered part of
Notting Hill), which he photographed between 1956 and 1961. The novelist
Colin MacInnes asked Mayne to contribute the cover shot for Absolute Beginners (1959), which is set in the area around Southam Street. The Southam Street collection is of national importance, and is now held by the
Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Most of Southam Street was demolished in 1969 to make way for
Trellick Tower; a small section still exists. Mayne's Southam Street work had a major retrospective exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1986; and was brought to a new audience in the 1990s, through being extensively used for concert backdrops, record sleeves and press-adverts by the singer
Morrissey.[2]
In the early 1960s Mayne moved into colour photography, photographing
Greece and Spain, artists and their studios, and then landscapes, and publishing work in the mid and late 1960s in the new Sunday Times and Observer colour magazines.
In 1962, Mayne married the playwright
Ann Jellicoe. They moved to
Lyme Regis in Dorset in 1975.
A major exhibition of his portraits was held at the
National Portrait Gallery in 2004, and there have been other major exhibitions at
Victoria Art Gallery, Bath (2013) and at
The Photographers' Gallery, London (2017). He was represented in an important exhibition at Tate, Liverpool in 2006. Mayne's work is also seen in the film version of Absolute Beginners.
Mayne was an influential figure for the cinematographer
Roger Deakins[3]
Francis Newton (i.e.
Eric Hobsbawm). The Jazz Scene. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1959. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1960. Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1961. New York: Da Capo, 1975. With 12 photographs by Mayne.[16]
Roger Mayne, "Portrait of Southam Street". In
Theo Crosby, ed. Uppercase 5. London: Whitefriars, 1961. With 57 photographs by Mayne.[17]
Hugh J. Klare. Anatomy of Prison. Harmondsworth, Middx: Penguin, 1962. With 9 photographs by Mayne.
Simon Clements, et al. Reflections: An English Course for Students Aged 14–18. London: Oxford University Press, 1963. With 12 photographs by Mayne.
Carl-Olof Lång. Engelska bilder – mest om teater: Handbok till Radioteaterns huvudserie 1966/67. Stockholm: Sveriges Radio Vorlag, 1966. With 26 photographs by Mayne. (in Swedish)
Simon Clements, et al. Things Being Various. London: Oxford University Press, 1967. With 81 photographs by Mayne.
Ann Jellicoe and Roger Mayne. Shell Guide to Devon. London: Faber & Faber, 1975. (On the cover: Devon: A Shell Guide.) With 163 photographs by Mayne.
Bruce Watken. Shell Guide to Surrey. London: Faber & Faber, 1977.
ISBN0-571-09609-3. With 17 photographs by Mayne.
UNESCO. Le Monde me doit l'avenir. 1979. (in French) With 13 photographs by Mayne.
Roger Mayne. The Street Photographs of Roger Mayne. London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1986.
ISBN1-85177-002-X. With text by
Mark Haworth-Booth. London: Zelda Cheatle Press, 1993.
Martin Harrison. Young Meteors: British Photojournalism, 1957–1965. London: Cape, 1998.
^Here and (unless otherwise noted) for other books listed below and published before 1986, the number of photographs by Mayne is as stated in the list "Bookjackets and Books", The Street Photographs of Roger Mayne (London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1986), 81–83. The latter list also describes many items not listed here.