Roger Mayne

Roger Mayne (5 May 1929 – 7 June 2014) was an English photographer, best known for his documentation of the children of Southam Street, London.

Here he became interested in photographic processing, and met Hugo van Wadenoyen, a key figure in British photography's break with pictorialism.

The novelist Colin MacInnes asked Mayne to contribute the cover shot for Absolute Beginners (1959), which is set in the area around Southam Street.

The Southam Street collection is of national importance, and is now held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Mayne's Southam Street work had a major retrospective exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1986; and was brought to a new audience in the 1990s, through being extensively used for concert backdrops, record sleeves and press-adverts by the singer Morrissey.