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 on Afro-Caribbean and Irish residents in homes, on the street, in pubs, and in churches, tracing the routines and social codes that structure neighborhood 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 organize 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 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. Shot 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 Autograph, Historic England, and the Victoria and Albert Museum, and a digital archive donated to Brent Museum and Archives.
