Description
Charlie Phillips – A Grassroots Legacy is printing now, and we expect to be taking orders in January 2026.
Criminally overlooked for decades, the archive of one of Britainโs greatest photographers is finally being brought together by Bluecoat Press in a beautifully curated book, designed and printed to the highest standard
Charlie Phillips describes himself as a โWindrush kidโ. 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 โ back then regarded as a ghetto โ with few possessions, sharing a single, cramped room with his parents.
After a Black American GI looking for fun in the city left behind a Kodak Retina camera at a house party in Notting Hill (swapping it with Charlieโs father for taxi fare), Charlieโs life changed. Aged 14, he taught himself to develop 35mm film, turning his bathroom into a darkroom in the dead of night when everyone was asleep. A copy of The Saturday Evening Post the GI also left behind, with the painting The Runaway by Norman Rockwell on the cover, became his gateway to another world.
At first, he took photos of his friends and sold them at school, but then through the lens he began to document the world around him, the emerging one of musicians, street life, parties, families and rude boys in their zoot suits arriving fresh from Tilbury Docks; and the disappearing one, taking us into the unseen world of Afro-Caribbean funeral culture (a decades-long project called How Great Thou Art has documented changing fashions as much as changing attitudes) and photographing the final days of streets demolished for the Westway flyover. The relaxed nature of his subjects speak of Charlieโs own spontaneous style and personality, but the compositions tell a bigger story of a changing London and Britain.
In recent years, Charlie has called the ordinary people he shot in Notting Hill โthe silent minorityโ, 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.
โI was a grassroots photographer,โ Charlie says. โI was just an ordinary Black guy from the ghetto โ a bit radical, part of the alternative culture of that time. My associations lay with Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Che Guevara, the Beat Generation.โ
