Roger Mayne in FINANCIAL TIMES
January 28, 2023 - Alistair Bailey
SNAPSHOT: 'Goalie, Brindley Road' (1956) by Roger Mayne
Fourteen Years before England's Gordon Banks made football's greatest ever save, against Pelé in the group stage of the World Cup in Mexico, Roger Mayne's 'Goalie' performed similar heroics on the street in Paddington, London. A new exhibition of Mayne's work is a seleciton of prints from his time spent recording the working-class neighbourhoods of Britain in the 1950s and 1960s.
Mayne's photographs capture neighbourhoods still in war's shadow, but filled with the energy of the "sidewalk ballet", as the American urbanist Jane Jacobs evocatively put it. Mayne admitted that his subject choices fed a desire to "reach for the kind of childhood I didn't have". A lingering sadness frame a high-contrast soot-blackened window into a country — and social class — in the throes of change.
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