In Conversation with Charlie Philipps – A Grassroots Legacy

The event will feature an exhibition of Charlie Phillips' photographs, on display at the Chelsea Library Gallery from 20 May to 31 May, closing with a conversation with the artist on Saturday, 31 May at 3 pm.

Notting Hill Couple — Anita Santiago and Osmond (Gus) Philip

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 – back then regarded as a ghetto – 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 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 when everyone was asleep.

Notting Hill Carnival

In recent years, Charlie has called the ordinary 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.”

Outside the ‘Piss House’ pub, Portobello Road, 1968

Charlie Phillips has only recently been afforded the recognition his work deserves, the doors that closed in the early 1970s opening half a century later. 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, who selected the 1967 Notting Hill Couple for his The Face Of Britain book and TV series, called Charlie “one of Britain’s great photo-portraitists… a visual poet; chronicler, champion, witness of a gone world”. All true, yet despite the accolades and plaudits, the work of Charlie Phillips remains overlooked and largely unpublished – the impossibly rare 1991 collection Notting Hill In The Sixties has long since disappeared from view.

Muhammed Ali

Join us to celebrate this iconic photographer!

Light refreshments will be provided.

If you are interested in exhbiting your work at our gallery we'd like to hear from you.

For details, please email: chelseagalleryhire@rbkc.gov.uk

Chelsea Gallery at Chelsea Library | Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council