Roger Mayne

Roger Mayne (1929–2014) was a British photographer whose intimate street portraits helped define postwar documentary photography in the United Kingdom. Born in Cambridge, he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art before working briefly in documentary film. In the mid‑1950s he turned to still photography, drawn to capturing the everyday lives of London’s working‑class neighborhoods.

Mayne’s most celebrated work documents the children of Southam Street, London, between 1956 and 1961. Armed with a Leica, he recorded spontaneous moments—groups of boys kicking footballs in alleyways, girls skipping rope on cobbled streets—that revealed both the resilience and the dignity of his subjects. These images appeared in his first monograph, Children of the Street (1961), and secured his reputation alongside peers like Henri Cartier‑Bresson and Bill Brandt.

In 1968 Mayne accepted a lectureship in photography at Newcastle Polytechnic, where he taught until 1985, influencing a new generation of image‑makers. His work has been exhibited at the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Tate Britain, and the International Center of Photography, and is held in major collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the National Portrait Gallery, London. Over his career Mayne continued to explore the interplay of social history and visual form—whether in London’s docklands, the industrial North-East, or the Mediterranean coast—leaving behind a body of work that remains a touchstone for photographers exploring community and change.