[2] David Mellor — as he was called before he began using his full name professionally to avoid confusion with the politician of the same name — grew up in Leicester as the child of a lorry-driver and a hairdresser; he attended school intermittently due to his severe asthma.
During this time Asa Briggs, then Vice-Chancellor of the University, received the archive of Mass-Observation from Tom Harrisson.
For his first job Mellor catalogued this archive, and he then published and curated exhibitions about the substantial collection of pre-war photographs of working-class life contained within it.
[1] Exhibitions curated by Mellor include Paradise Lost: The New Romantic Imagination in Britain (Barbican Centre, 1987);[3] The Sixties (1993);[1] and Co-Optic & Documentary Photography Group (Brighton Photo Biennial, 2014).
[4] As a professor of art at Sussex University, his students included Jeremy Deller.