Roger Mayne

This beautiful catalogue reassesses the work of acclaimed British photographerRoger Mayne (1929–2014), famous for his arresting street scenes capturing Britain’spost-war youth. It accompanies an exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, the first ofits kind since 2017.Self-taught and influential in the advocacy of photography as an art form, Mayne waspassionate about representing human life as he found it – most famously, in his streetimages of low-income communities in West London. Capturing children at play andthe emerging phenomenon of the ‘swaggering teenager’, Mayne discovered in the younga defining energy that perfectly embodied both the scars and the vitality of post-warBritain.The exhibition of more than sixty photographs brings together a selection ofMayne’s iconic London scenes with later, almost entirely unknown intimate portraitsof his own family in rural Dorset. While these two strands have a different tenor, theyshare Mayne’s radical empathy and his evident desire to create images with lastingimpact, sensitivity and artistic integrity. With those pictured from the 1950s now intheir senior years and a new generation of young people faced with myriad crises,Mayne’s images of childhood, adolescence and family feel especially poignant andtimely.The catalogue is richly illustrated and includes an original essay by Jane Alison andan interview with Mayne’s daughter, Katkin Tremayne.