The father and son photographer’s business of Jim and Frank Manning operated out of Windmill Row in Kennington from 1949 to 2022. After Frank’s sudden death, their archive of 500,000 negatives passed to Lambeth Archives. This talk celebrates this extraordinary body of work taken over almost seventy-five years.
In the impoverished and rationed world of post-war Lambeth, cameras were expensive, and film was virtually unobtainable. In 1949, when Jim Manning started up his business, the wedding photograph was the one luxury that newly married couples would splash out on, even when the church was a bomb-damaged ruin.
Jim Manning was thirty years old when he photographed his first Kennington wedding. Recently demobbed, working out of his mother’s house in Newington and renting darkroom space in Brixton, his fledgling business took off and within three years he had moved into to a studio at 3 Windmill Row, Kennington. Two years later in 1954 he expanded into shop-front premises at 308 Kennington Road and started offering studio portraiture and baby photos alongside the wedding work.
In 1960, Jim’s teenage son, Frank, began working with his father. After graduating from the London College of Printing, Frank then further expanded the business into commercial photography and advertising, working for PR companies and in the process photographed many local Kennington businesses, institutions and celebrities. After Jim died in 1993, Frank would run the business for a further 30 years.
After Frank’s sudden death in 2022, Manning Photographers closed and donated the studio’s collection of a half a million negatives – the largest single photographic archive that Lambeth Archives holds and probably the largest anywhere in London – together with all the original order books make up an astonishingly complete collection.
Join Lambeth Archives for an illustrated talk on the collection.
You can see much more of the Manning Archive at our image website, https://boroughphotos.org/lambeth/category/manning-photographers/
Event organised by the Friends of Durning Library. For refreshments a £3 donation is requested.
