Revival

Roy Mehta (1968)

Multicultural community life and daily rituals in Brent, documented through tender black-and-white photography across north-west London between 1989 and 1993.

Description

Revival: London 1989–1993 is Roy Mehta’s portrait and street archive, made in Brent (Harlesden and Willesden) between 1989 and 1993. The photographs focus predominantly on Afro-Caribbean and Irish residents in homes, on the street, in pubs, and in churches, tracing the routines and social codes that structure neighbourhood life. Revival studies how belonging is produced through everyday practice—family ties, work, worship, and informal sociability—and it also challenges 1980s press images that often reduced diasporic communities to conflict. Across the sequence, solidarity is shown as a set of actions rather than a slogan, and faith and ritual appear as practical frameworks that are organised around care, identity, and continuity.

Visually, the photographs move between quiet interiors and public scenes: seated portraits and family gatherings, barbers and dance floors, street corners and shopfronts, church services and pastoral visits. Working predominantly in a consistent square frame, Mehta emphasizes faces, hands, and the textures of lived-in rooms as much as the bustle of the street. Direct flash shapes many images, letting shadow and highlight organize attention around gestures—an embrace, a hand on a shoulder, fingers clasped in prayer—so that touch becomes a recurring motif.

The project's look is grounded in analog practice. Made on black-and-white film and preserved as negatives, the work remained largely unprinted until Mehta revisited it decades later, scanning and resequencing the series with an emphasis on "community, touch and healing".

First published as a photobook by Hoxton Mini Press in 2021, Revival: London 1989–1993 has since circulated through community and institutional contexts: a solo presentation at The Library at Willesden Green (2022), a showing at PhotoNorth Festival (2023), and inclusion in wider survey exhibitions such as Facing Britain: A Survey of Post-War British Photography (2021–2022) and Tate Britain’s The 80s: Photographing Britain (2024–2025). The work has moved from personal archive to public record, with material in the collections of The Library of Birmingham, the IKS Collection, Germany and a digital archive donated to Brent Museum and Archives.

Behind the work

For nearly thirty years, the vast majority of the Revival series existed only as an archive of unprinted negatives stored in boxes. Mehta himself referred to the unexamined collection as an "unresolved body of work" before the Brent 2020 London Borough of Culture festival prompted him to finally revisit and print the work.

During the pre-internet era of the late 80s, Mehta found that building trust was essential to his "insider" approach. He noted that once residents established he wasn't from an official body, they were happy to let him stand in a corner and make work in their private spaces. Long before social media, he would give his subjects physical prints of their portraits to share with their families, which helped him gain acceptance into churches, pubs, homes, and dancehalls.

Mehta’s decision to document his home borough was sparked during his time at Farnham College. He was specifically inspired by a guest lecture from Chris Killip, whose long-term work in Newcastle encouraged Mehta to return to the streets he had roamed as a child to create work with a personal family connection. Farnham, specifically the West Surrey College of Art & Design (now the University for the Creative Arts (UCA)), was a significant hub for the "new British documentary photography" movement in the 1980s. Key photographers associated with this movement either taught or studied there.

The publication of Revival led to a real-world "time travel" event when Mehta reconnected with Robert and Brian Smythe. He had photographed them as children in 1989 and, thirty years later, was able to re-photograph them and produce a short film where they reflected on their upbringing in Harlesden.

Quotes by the photographer

"I have always tried to express through my work, the quiet, often overlooked moments that reveal the depth and warmth of community life. I’ve always been drawn to these quieter moments, the ones that happen in between events, on the street, or outside someone’s home, spaces where emotion and everyday life meet."

"I wanted the work to depict compassion and solidarity, along with reflections of the everyday. I felt these were absent from some mainstream representations of diasporic identities at that time in the 1980s."

"I grew up in Wembley in North-West London, part of the borough of Brent, one of the most ethnically diverse areas in the UK. In the 1970s and 80s, it was a place of transition, full of arrivals and departures and a layering of different cultural experiences."

"Much of the work was made in the late 1980’s at a time when working with photography was a radically different practice; away from the worries of online discourse, there was a freedom to make work that existed only in one space."

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