Roger Mayne
Achievement in Documentary

Roger Mayne was born in Cambridge, England. He studied chemistry at Balliol College, Oxford University. There he became interested in photographic processing, and met Hugo Van Wadenoyen; a key figure in British photography’s break with pictorials. Graduating in 1951, Mayne contributed pictures to the Picture Post, and was an occasional film stills photographer. In the early 1950’s 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 (USA). 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 children’s street culture of Southam Street in Notting Dale, which he photographed between 1956 and 1961. Novelist Colin Maclnnes 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.

The Southam Street project inspired Mayne’s wife, the writer Ann Jellicoe, to write a play. This became the Rita Tushingham movie The Knack. This movie was filmed in the area, and Southam Street appears as ‘Northam Street.’ Mayne’s work is also seen in the feature-film version of Absolute Beginners.

Southam Street was demolished in 1969. Mayne’s Southam Street work was brought to a new audience in the 1990’s, through being extensively used for concert backdrops, record sleeves and press-adverts by the singer Morrissey, and through a major 1996 retrospective exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

In the Early 1960’s Mayne moved into color photography, photographing Greece and Spain, artists & their studios, and then landscapes, and publishing work in the mid and late 1960’s in the new Sunday Times and Observer color magazines.

In 1975, Mayne and his wife moved to Lyme Regis in Dorset. A major exhibition of his portraits was held at the National Portrait Galley in 2004.