Katkin Tremayne is looking at a photo of her father, Roger Mayne. It is a colour snap and he stands in the snow, wearing a straw sunhat, a floppy, incongruously chic affair purchased in New York for Tremayne’s mother, playwright and director Ann Jellicoe. You cannot see his face because he is holding a camera in front of it. “If he did not have the camera around his neck and then saw a picture he wanted to take, he would curse,” Tremayne remembers, then laughs.
We are in Netherbury, west Dorset, where she lives, and have just walked down her garden path, thickly flanked by snowdrops, and stepped inside an ex-army shipping container in which is stored a neatly organised archive of her father’s work (the V&A also holds many of his photographs). Mayne died in 2014 and Tremayne has collaborated on an exhibition that opens on 3 March at the Photographer’s Gallery in London – a labour of love. Her father’s photographs – unusual, sympathetic and often entrancing – influenced a postwar generation of photographers. And they speak to us now because of the way they describe a sense of community, something many people feel we have lost. As Anna Douglas, who curated the show with Karen McQuaid, says: “We need to relocate ourselves in postwar optimism.” She loves, she adds, the way Mayne’s work is “open to interpretation”.
Tremayne is fiftyish and robustly unconventional – interesting and interested – as one supposes her father must have been. She lives in a marvellous eco house built of straw bales (when I express incredulity, she shows me the straw, visible behind a decorative plate). She trained as a painter, earns her living as a potter and we’ve talked our way through a lunch of homemade soup (served in the beautiful ceramic bowls she makes) as she explains how her father’s career began.
Roger was the second son of a “pushy and academic” father, AB Mayne, a gifted mathematician, headmaster and author of a bestselling algebra textbook. He died while Roger was studying chemistry at Oxford. It was her grandfather’s death that freed her father: “Unshackled from parental expectation, he got hooked on photography.”
From the beginning, Mayne had an eye – he had barely graduated when he succeeded in selling a photograph of a radical student dance production to Picture Post. A “golden path opened up in front of him”, Tremayne says. He never even toyed with another career. With a small inheritance (the algebra books), he bought a flat in Addison Avenue, in west London, where he “lived frugally on eggs and toast”.
She explains how a stroll changed his life: “One day, he went for a walk, turned a corner and there was Southam Street. It was a very poor area, with no cars, but a play street: there was hopscotch, swings made out of lamp-posts, boys playing football – exuberance.”
Between 1956 and 1961, Southam Street became Mayne’s subject. Tremayne remembers opening a file after his death labelled “First Day”. It was filled with “stunning” pictures, conveying the excitement of his first encounter with the street.
In Mayne’s work, one has the sense that life is supplying the poses. “He was open to whatever was happening,” Tremayne says. “He had a horror of artificiality.” He resisted stage directions, partly because he was “no good at setting up photos”. Politically, he was centre-left but did not lecture or hector. “He did not approach his work as a photojournalist [although he did lots of freelance jobs for newspapers and magazines]. He would be struck by a face or a group. I remember watching him spot a potential photo – everything else would disappear. He’d climb over people, if necessary, to get his picture.”
He was expert at the technicalities: “He had a box camera and a light metre. You had to have a rigorous mind to be a photographer then – nothing was automatic.” And he was “puritanical… he did not snap away merrily. If you look at the contact sheets, there will usually be half-a-dozen amazing photos.”
Scientific ability helped. But, above all, he wanted photography to be recognised as an art. “He was an angry young man before he met my mum – frustrated that photography was viewed as a throwaway thing.”
Tremayne shows me two pencilled quotations in her father’s hand. One reads: “If you know before you look, then you cannot see for knowing.” The initials are TF – but neither of us knows who TF was. The other is Picasso’s: “I do not seek, I find.” Each illuminates Mayne’s work. The sense is that his subjects either do not know or do not care that they are being photographed. The pictures exist at an unbridgeable remove from our narcissistic digital age. In Men and Boys in Southam Street (1959), a boy looks directly at us, as though the camera were his interlocutor. It is a painterly portrait. The boy is not thinking about posting the result on Facebook. Tremayne remembers her father telling her he knew how to make children relax: “He had the ability to fade into the background.”
In another picture, two lads are in a wicked world of their own, sharing a cigarette and a joke, unaware their secret is no longer secret. In another image, boys leap for a ball beyond the picture’s frame, creating the possibility that they are jumping for joy. And there is an unforgettable picture of a girl about to do a handstand, her silhouette making her look like a human bird.
These pictures are of a vanished world and induce a complicated nostalgia. Anna Douglas is right to draw attention to the optimism. The photograph of children playing with marbles is delightful, innocent, communal, in contrast to our solitary soullessness (nowadays, the children would all be on their mobile phones). And the girl swinging so high looks as if her swing will flip upside down as the chains relax – I remember that scary thrill from my childhood. But there is a bleaker story here. Some of the children have desolate stares. The girl on the cover of a Pelican book, Children Under Stress, has tortured hands that speak for her – a plea in the fingers. The smart West Indians in hats walking down Southam Street look showily unrelaxed. And there is the inescapable melancholy of time that has passed: the children have gone, the snow in Leeds thawed 60 years ago, Southam Street was largely demolished, in 1969, to make space for Trellick Tower.
After Mayne’s death, it was Tremayne who sorted out the family house, Colway Manor, in Lyme Regis: “His work seemed to fill three floors.” It must have been rather like beachcombing (the house was full of shells and rocks as well as art posters). While sifting through, she realised how interested her father had been in texture – he loved graffiti, patterns, abstraction. He had been friends with St Ives painters Terry Frost, Roger Hilton and Patrick Heron and was also always fascinated by composition, experimenting with large photographic prints, mounting methods and radical installations.
The exhibition will include his remarkable series of 310 colour photos on five screens, “The British at Leisure”, commissioned by the architect Theo Crosby for the Milan Triennale in 1964 and meticulously reconstructed by Tremayne. It was accompanied by a jazz piece by Johnny Scott and, although that piece is irretrievable, Scott, 86, was delighted to offer an alternative, which Tremayne plays to me on her laptop: a sultry, capricious flautist doing his thing. We then look at the arresting miscellany of leisurely Britain: girls playing hockey, people on bumper cars, a hunt at Tonbridge, hippies at a jazz festival… What strikes me most is British gawkiness. The couple dancing look particularly desperate, as if about to pull a muscle. When glamour is attempted, there is awkwardness – Brits were not at home in their glad rags.
Mayne did a lot of work for the Observer and Tremayne shows me a Review front, of 6 August 1961, by Peter and Iona Opie: “The Private World of Children’s Games”. It is illustrated with wonderful photographs of lively, untidy children being themselves. In 1979, Mayne also took pictures for the Observer magazine’s series “Village England”, and he was successful with book covers too. The novelist Colin MacInnes asked him to contribute a cover for Absolute Beginners (1959) and Mayne’s photos were later used in the 1986 film of the novel. Tremayne remembers Absolute Beginners being made and the excitement when her father met David Bowie. Later on, Morrissey would also become a fan, using Mayne’s pictures on his Interlude record sleeve and as backdrops to his 1997 tour. Mayne is a presence on Morrissey’s website, pronouncing photography a “humanist art”.
Mayne’s photographs are praised for their empathy. But how empathetic was he as a man? “He was private. He wouldn’t ever talk to us about his work – you might be vaguely aware he had been in the dark room but my brother and I were not allowed over its threshold. He was a good raconteur but found it hard to talk about deeper emotions.” Meeting her mother and having children “helped open him out”.
Mayne met Jellicoe in 1960 when he was hanging an exhibition in the foyer of the Royal Court, where she was literary manager. She apparently still likes to remember (she is in a nursing home now) how handsome he was as a young man and his “nice shoes”. When Jellicoe’s play The Knack (1962) became a hit (and, in 1965, an award-winning film starring Rita Tushingham), there was enough money to buy a holiday cottage in Monkton Wyld, Dorset.
Although they enjoyed London’s artistic scene – “the celebs and parties” – they acquired a taste for the West Country and, in 1974, left London to live in Lyme Regis. “They were anxious about the oil crisis; you couldn’t buy salt in the shops and they wanted to raise us in the country.” Perhaps unsurprisingly, after “a couple of years of baking bread in Dorset”, the rural idyll started to bore Jellicoe. She reinvented herself as a pioneer of community theatre and went on to write a book about it (Mayne took marvellous photos of her workshops and productions).
So much changed for Mayne with the move to the country. He became a “house husband” and a landscape photographer. Tremendous black-and-white seascapes in which water and sky dramatically collide hang in the corridors of Tremayne’s house. He was also always “fascinated by the way children grow up. He took thousands of photos of us and, every Christmas, would give Mum an album of the year in photos. He loved making these books. The photos were not all the same size – how they worked together was important to him.”
Tremayne pulls out a volume: “Katkin’s Second Year”. The letters of her name do a jig on the opening page. Each photo is perfectly composed – these are no ordinary family snaps. My favourite shows two-year-old Katkin sitting on a log in a cottage garden, a blaze of shasta daisies behind her. She has taken possession of her father’s sunhat and is mangling it on her knee, smiling delightedly. Everything about the picture beguiles: the comedy of what she is doing with the hat, the rural scene and her fat little hand reaching out towards the camera.
Tremayne shows me a different kind of exhibit too – the funeral order of service from June 2014, upon which is printed the last picture of her father taken by Poppy, her 14-year-old daughter, a few months before he died. Poppy’s hunch had been that time was running out and that the family needed to get together. They went to “a posh restaurant in Lyme Regis”. The photo, taken after dinner, shows Mayne waving goodbye, both arms jubilantly raised, but his face is completely out of focus. It is as if the camera knew he was about to fade from view – the thing he had always confessed to doing so well.
Roger Mayne’s photographs are at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, 3 March to 11 June; tpg.org.uk
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