Bluecoat Press announced the publication of its retrospective of the era-defining London street photography of Charlie Phillips. A Grassroots Legacy 1962 – 2010 collects for the first time Charlie’s images, from the streets of Notting Hill in the 1960s to his later work chronicling Afro-Caribbean funeral culture in the city, encompassing over 100 photographs in a cloth-bound hardback edition.
Charlie Phillips describes himself as a “Windrush kid”. He arrived in London from Jamaica in the late 1950s at the age of 11. It was a time of slum landlords and race riots. He spent his teenage years in Notting Hill with few possessions, sharing a single, cramped room with his parents.
After a Black American GI left behind a Kodak Retina camera at a house party in Notting Hill (swapping it with Charlie’s father for taxi fare), Charlie’s life changed. Aged 14, he taught himself to develop 35mm film, turning his bathroom into a darkroom in the dead of night.
In recent years, Charlie has called the people he shot in Notting Hill “the silent minority”, a strata of society whose lives would have gone undocumented had they not had an artist living among them, taking photos with them barely noticing. Not that he ever saw himself that way.
“I was a grassroots photographer,” Charlie says. “I was just an ordinary Black guy from the ghetto – a bit radical, part of the alternative culture of that time. My associations lay with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Che Guevara, the Beat Generation.”
Charlie has only recently been afforded the recognition his work deserves. Time Out called him “the greatest photographer you’ve never heard of” and The Root described him as “the most important (yet least lauded) Black photographer of his generation”. Historian Simon Schama called Charlie “one of Britain’s great photo-portraitists… a visual poet; chronicler, champion, witness of a gone world”.
“A dedication to community is what defines Charlie’s work, binding the photographs together to showcase a story of Britain rarely seen”, said Tom Booth-Woodger, Head of Publishing at Bluecoat Press. “We hope that finally bringing that work together in this edition will help it connect with new audiences – and properly honour his legacy as an artist.”
Charlie Phillips A Grassroots Legacy 1962 – 2010
Bluecoat Press
First Edition
240 x 291mm, 112 pages
Cloth-bound hardcover with tip-in With an introduction by
Cecil Gutzmore and a preface by Paul Goodwin
Duotone printed and bound by MAS Matbaa, Istanbul
£55 $75 €65
www.bluecoatpress.co.uk
