In vivid and completely natural un/reality
As readers of Art Blart over the years will know, I love a committed social documentary photographer, an artist with a heart and an informed social consciousness, one who is aware of the right or wrong actions (conscience).
Roger Mayne is one such photographer. Others in the pantheon include Helen Levitt, Chris Killip, Don McCullin, Edith Tudor-Hart, Bill Brandt, Tony Ray-Jones, Syd Shelton, Neil Kenlock, Lewis Hine, Jacob Riis, Daniel Meadows, Gordon Parks, Milton Rogovin, Teenie Harris, and Dave Heath to name just a few.
Mayne’s portrait of the working class areas of London life, his gritty black and white images of a “crumbling post-war Britain” and the “modernisation of working class neighbourhoods after the war” picture – as Colin MacInnes author of the “cult 1959 novel Absolute Beginners, a lively account of the emergence of teen culture and attitude in the late 1950s” (wall text) states – “a rotting slum of a sharp, horrible vivacity.”1
What a turn of phrase!
But what MacInnes forgets is that there was community in those very slums, that there was a culture of supporting each other through the tough times, especially after the deprivations of the Second World War and the ongoing rationing which lasted until mid-1954 in the United Kingdom. I vividly remember as a child visiting my grandmother in a small town in suburban Hertfordshire in the 1960s and recall the drabness of the identical houses cheek by jowl, the washing hung in the backyard and the outdoor loo, and the dampness, darkness of the house. And the cold and the rain. But then there were the children playing in the streets, the smiles and the joy of freedom despite the poverty.
Mayne’s photographs push further than mere documentary reportage on these communities. As he himself says, photography becomes art through a “particular mixture of reality and unreality” and the photographers power to select what they are photographing. They become art through the photographers consciousness.
Here I believe that the mixture of reality and unreality and previsualisation (selection of what to photograph and how to frame the image) in Mayne’s photographs can be seen as a form of “magic realism” which is “a style or genre of fiction and art that presents a realistic view of the world while incorporating magical elements, often blurring the lines between fantasy and reality.”2 Matthew Strecher (1999) defines it as “what happens when a highly detailed, realistic setting is invaded by something too strange to believe.”3
Indeed, if we look at Mayne’s photograph Southam Street Group, North Kensington, London (1956, above) there is something so magical and strange about the atmosphere of this image – the out of focus girl in the foreground, boy with his hand to his neck, self absorbed girl on the steps looking out, peeling paint of the building, young children watching the man holding the bicycle and a second, orphaned larger wheel (what is it doing there?), the small child being propped on the too large bicycle, bulky pram lurking, hunkering at the side of the image – it is as though the image was part of a fable, a story about mythical characters and streetscapes that can never happen again.
This magic realism is repeated again and again in Mayne’s images: that sense of the extra/ordinary, of the super/natural – the spacing of the figures in Southam Street Corner, North Kensington, London (1957, below); the zoomorphic characteristics of the figures in Girls doing a Handstand, Southam Street (1956, below); the contrast between the stiff-legged boy and arms folded screaming girl in Screaming Child, Southam St. (North Kensington) (1956, below); and the lean of the whole photograph … the women, reaching out to touch the man child in Nottingham, St Ann’s (1969, below). And on we could go, each image taking us out of ourselves into strange new (old) worlds.
Roger Mayne was truly a magnificent, poetic artist. His subjects, though never appearing “posed,” confront the spectator in vivid and completely natural un/reality.4 Spirits who still inhabit London’s deliquescent urban spaces.
Dr Marcus Bunyan
1/ Colin MacInnes (British, 1914-1976) Poverty and poetry in W.10 c. 1961
2/“Magic realism,” on the Wikipedia website
3/ Strecher, Matthew C. 1999. “Magical Realism and the Search for Identity in the Fiction of Murakami Haruki.” Journal of Japanese Studies 25(2): 263–98. p. 267 quoted in “Magic realism,” on the Wikipedia website
4/ Adapted from Colin MacInnes Op. cit.,
Main image:
Roger Mayne (British, 1929-2014)
Southam Street Group, North Kensington, London
1956
Vintage gelatin silver print
55.5 x 80.4cm
Courtesy Victoria & Albert Museum
Exhibition dates: 14th June – 1st September, 2024
SEE THE FULL POSTING AT https://artblart.com/2024/08/16/exhibition-roger-mayne-youth-at-the-courtauld-gallery-london/
Roger Mayne (British, 1929-2014)
Teenagers, Soho Fair, London
17 July 1958
Vintage gelatin silver print
24 x 36cm
Courtesy Wilson Centre for Photography
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