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Roger Mayne

 
Art Encyclopedia: Roger Mayne

(b Cambridge, 5 May 1929). English photographer. He is known principally for his images of British street life, which date from 1956 to the early 1960s. His inspired photographs of Teddy boys (a youth subculture of the late 1950s) and their girlfriends, of adults and of children playing have been widely exhibited and published. His extended study of Southam Street, North Kensington, was the result of five years of photography (1956-61) in one London street; in total, he produced around 1400 negatives. Other subjects included theatre portraiture and especially landscape, in Spain, Greece and Britain, in monochrome and in colour. His photographs for the Shell Guide to Devon were published in London in 1975, with a text by his wife Ann Jellicoe. From the mid-1960s Mayne was interested in documenting the growth of his children. He later developed an interest in drawing and etching.

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Photography Encyclopedia: Roger Mayne
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Mayne, Roger (b. 1929). Though still an active photographer, printmaker, and draughtsman, Mayne will always be linked with England in the 1950s and early 1960s—especially with the London district of Notting Dale, described by Colin MacInnes in his novel Absolute Beginners (1959). Mayne studied chemistry at Oxford and while still there published his first photographs, of a student ballet production, in Picture Post. He was quick to acquaint himself with the works of masters like Cartier-Bresson, Steinert, Strand, and Weegee and—with Hugo van Wadenoyen—exhibited international contemporary photographs in Britain through the Combined Societies. Through exhibitions, articles, and his own widely published work, Mayne injected a new urgency and ambition into British photography. In 1956 he held a one-man show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and discovered one of his most inspiring subjects—Southam Street, London W10. He photographed the street and its lively inhabitants for five years. As well as street environments and the teenager phenomenon, Mayne photographed the Aldermaston anti-nuclear marches, northern factories, landscapes, family life, the British at play. Subsequent exhibitions and publications established him as one of Britain's modern masters.

— Mark Haworth-Booth

Bibliography

  • Mayne, R., Photographs (2001)
Wikipedia: Roger Mayne
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Roger Mayne (born 1929 in Cambridge) is an English photographer, most famous for his documentation of the children of Southam Street, London.

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 the declining 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 (U.S.). 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 MacInnes asked Mayne to contribute the cover shot for Absolute Beginners (1959), which is set in the area around Southam Street (then called Notting Dale, now Notting Hill). The Southam Street collection is of national importance, and is now held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Southam Street was demolished in 1969. Mayne's Southam Street work 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, and through a major 1986 retrospective exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

In the early 1960s Mayne moved into colour photography, photographing Greece and Spain, artists & 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 playwright Ann Jellicoe. He and his wife moved to Lyme Regis in Dorset in 1975. A major exhibition of his portraits was held at the National Portrait Gallery in 2004. He was represented in an important exhibition at Tate, Liverpool in 2006. His work continues to be represented in various venues. Mayne's work is also seen in the feature-film version of Absolute Beginners.

Further reading

  • Roger Mayne. Street Photographs of Roger Mayne. (1993; reprinted by Victoria & Albert Museum, 1996)
  • Roger Mayne. Photographs. (Random House, 2001)
  • Martin Harrison. Young Meteors: British photojournalism, 1957-1965. (Cape, 1998).

External links


 
 

 

Copyrights:

Art Encyclopedia. The Concise Grove Dictionary of Art. Copyright © 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.  Read more
Photography Encyclopedia. The Oxford Companion to the Photograph. Copyright © 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Roger Mayne" Read more