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Roy Mehta

Since he became a photographer, Mehta's work has regularly engaged in different ways with cultural identity, through images presented in REVIVAL, LONDON 1989-1993 and his other books and projects such as DISTANT RELATIONS and COASTLINE.

He is drawn to seeing how photography can offer us an opportunity to reflect on our common histories and celebrate our respective identities. His work explores how different cultures and identities touch, engage and interweave around each other.

As part of this process he has recently been making new work in Mumbai, India exploring a city that he could have gown up in had his family not moved to the UK. This new work examines second-generation immigration and the resulting cross-cultural fluidity.

In a similar way his work also explores what we consider to be ‘nature’, as in his recent series LOCKDOWN where he uses image and text to interpret the current Pandemic.

His work is in private collections and the permanent collections of Autograph, Historic England, The Library of Birmingham, The Harris Museum and Art Gallery and IKS Collection, Germany.

REVIVAL, LONDON 1989-1993

Tender photographs of the Afro-Carribbean and Irish communities in west London in the early 90s. Brent has a rich history of multiculturalism. Roy Mehta’s exquisite black and white photographs capture the daily rituals of its various communities, most notably the Afro-Caribbean and Irish, engaged in seemingly simple activities at home, in the street and at church. Shot from 1989-1993, the images move from profound moments of faith to quiet family moments and to the noisy streets outside, and remind us that every moment is an opportunity for connection and reflection.

‘These photographs, as an offering to a community, invite us to share the atmosphere of a subject’s inner being. They are charged with signs of care, compassion and faith. It’s these three important elements that hold this body of work together. They are visible here as signs made manifest through gesture, style, and cherished objects.’ ©Dr Mark Sealy MBE, director Autograph the Association of Black Photographers from the foreword.

‘Mehta doesn’t shy away from the sadness and difficulties of this foundational story, but his multiracial faces – taken in Brent, northwest London – remain coloured with British dreams, and they exude a vitality which suggests that, although things are never going to be easy, all will eventually be well.’ ©Caryl Phillips Novelist, Playwright and Essayist from the introduction

LOCKDOWN

'Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.’ Arundhati Roy: ‘The Pandemic is a Portal’

For many of us, Lockdown was an experience of blurred reality. Perhaps we are transitioning, living through a moment of transformative change, to arrive at a different way of living. In response, Mehta’s work explores the moments of transition in our locked down days.

By making work in the early morning and late afternoon light, he uses the opening and closing of the day as a metaphor for beginnings, endings and change. Through juxtaposing these images with text drawn from prose and poetry, each piece alludes to the Pandemic and the complex relationship that we have with our ideas of nature.

COASTLINE

‘The sea has had a profound influence on the shaping of British history and continues to play a part in our evolving sense of national identity. It encloses and separates us as a country, and in doing so it symbolically binds us together – as disparate as we are.

In defining a geographical space that is ‘apart’, the sea also begs a series of questions:

What makes us unique? What brings us here? What makes us stay?

The ragged coastline cradles our emotional and physical negotiations with the sea. Distance, intimacy, affection, regret, all the unconcealed emblems of love and familial entanglement are staged here.

And, in Mehta’s work, they become metaphors for a national culture at a point of transition.

Bringing together these people and the fragments of an already haphazard landscape of coastal structures and forms, Mehta has created a remarkable portrait of Britain searching for itself: clinging to the past, uncertain of the future, gazing out to sea.’

DISTANT RELATIONS

'Roy Mehta's intensely observed but quietly introspective images are also a meditation-but from a different vantage-point-on what Oladele Bamboye (who co-curated Mehta's 1996 show) calls "the anxiety involved in being Asian, British and yourself".

'Distant Relations' maps the fragile connections, not only within the extended family, but between two cultures. However, it does so not as a clash of incongruous entities, but in a subtler way 'different surfaces touch each other'.

His work is best characterised in terms of what it resists. It refuses the elaborate gesture, the grand narrative, the labelling and the categorisation, the strong statement, the easy answers. Especially, it infuses the 'othering' of the Asian experience. Instead, it takes the unobtrusive, more personal path by focusing on small and intimate things. Mehta goes to the places where unexpected, and often uncomfortable feelings are likely to emerge. If this leads one to expect a quiet, unobtrusive body of work, it ill prepares us for the boldly pictorial quality and strong visual impact of his images.

This refining down of attention and the altercations of focus are the key strategies that allow Mehta to defamiliarize and decontextualize his subjects, enabling us to see familiar things as if for the first time.'

His archive is available through LANG, to enquire about a specific series please contact the gallery via email.