The photographer Roger Mayne, who has died aged 85, had a highly original eye for elusive detail. Self-taught, he was passionate about photographing what he knew most famously, inner London. His skill in absorbing the radicalism of post-second world war "humanitarian photography" and interpreting it with artistic vision established him as one of the 20th century's leading photographers. It also made him influential in the development of photojournalism.
His photographs of west London street scenes in the 1950s captured members of the first generation to be identified as "teenagers". The W10 series, shot mainly around Paddington, contrasted young people's exuberance with the urban dereliction they inhabited. For five years from 1956, Mayne focused obsessively on Southam Street, later to be demolished as part of a slum clearance programme. The street takes on a life of its own through its young residents: there is a kind of innocence in the scruffy juveniles fighting with wooden swords or tipping each other out of broken prams. It is hard to relate these youngsters, boys in shorts and unlaced leather shoes, girls with school-uniform gingham frocks and kirby grips pinning back their hair, to subsequent generations of teenagers.
Continue reading...