Roger Mayne: Youth

This beautiful catalogue reassesses the work of acclaimed British photographer Roger Mayne (1929–2014), famous for his arresting street scenes capturing Britain’spost-war youth. It accompanies an exhibition at The Courtauld Gallery, the first of its kind since 2017.

Self-taught and influential in the advocacy of photography as an art form, Mayne was passionate about representing human life as he found it – most famously, in his street images of low-income communities in West London. Capturing children at play and the emerging phenomenon of the ‘swaggering teenager’, Mayne discovered in the young a defining energy that perfectly embodied both the scars and the vitality of post-war Britain.The exhibition of more than sixty photographs brings together a selection of Mayne’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, they share Mayne’s radical empathy and his evident desire to create images with lasting impact, sensitivity and artistic integrity. With those pictured from the 1950s now in their senior years and a new generation of young people faced with myriad crises, Mayne’s images of childhood, adolescence and family feel especially poignant and timely.The catalogue is richly illustrated and includes an original essay by Jane Alison and an interview with Mayne’s daughter, Katkin Tremayne.