Charlie Phillips was born in Kingston, Jamaica in the Caribbean in 1944. He immigrated with his family to England aged 12 and settled in Notting Hill, an area of London with a large British Caribbean community. He became best known for his photographs of Notting Hill during the period of West Indian migration, documenting the traditions and cultures of the African diaspora.
Photographer Charlie Phillips was born in Kingston, Jamaica on 22 November 1944. He immigrated to England aged 12, settling in London's Notting Hill, an area with a large British Caribbean community. His parents were immigrants of the so-called postwar ‘Windrush' generation (named after the Empire Windrush passenger ship which transported the new arrivals), encouraged by the 1948 British Nationality Act that granted citizenship and right of abode in the UK to all members of the British Empire. Phillips grew up against a background of hostility and prejudice, witnessing a series of violent attacks which became known as the Notting Hill race riots (1958), started when several white men assaulted a white woman whose husband was black. As a boy Phillips dreamt of becoming a naval architect, but he eventually spent three years in the merchant navy, working mostly in catering. His photographic career began by accident, when he was given a Kodak Brownie camera by a black American serviceman stationed in Notting Hill. He soon began photographing the African-Caribbean community around him, developing pictures in the bathroom at home, late at night, when his parents had gone to bed. As a young man he travelled across Europe and lived in Paris, Milan, and Rome, where in 1968–69 he took photographs of the student riots which marked ‘the start of my revolutionary, my bohemian years’ (Migration Museum). In Italy he earned a living as a paparazzo, contributed to Italian Vogue and Life Magazine and was cast as an extra in Federico Fellini’s 1969 film Satyricon. He also knew and admired the artist Giorgio de Chirico and became friends with photographer Henry Cartier Bresson. In 1971 Phillips became personal photographer to Muhammad Ali when the boxer came to Europe after he lost his title and boxing license, because he did not want to go to Vietnam to fight in the war. Phillips held his first exhibition in Milan in 1972, showing photographs portraying the hardships of urban migrant workers.
Back in England, Phillips recorded the traditions and cultures of the African diaspora in London, his images speaking of the intimacy and familiarity with which he viewed his own community. In particular, he focused on the changing rituals surrounding burial and mourning practices over several generations. His photographs documented a period marked by racist assaults on the African-Caribbean community, showing hand-scrawled adverts for rooms to let, with the words: ‘No coloured’, and graffiti on walls reading: ‘Keep Britain white’. But he also recorded the overcoming of these same prejudices, capturing black and white Londoners socialising together, laughing, drinking and kissing. One of his best-known photographs, Notting Hill Couple (V&A and Tate), came to symbolise that spirit. Taken at a party in 1967, it depicted a young black man with his arm around a young white woman. Both looked into the camera with expressions ‘that could be interpreted as hopeful, innocent, perhaps even defiant’ (Rose 2021). Phillips later declared: 'As far as I'm concerned, we haven't been given a proper platform to show our culture, our side of the story […] It's not Black history, this is British history, whether you like it or not (Wandsworth Times).
While living in Notting Hill in the 1960s he explored aspects of urban life, photographing friends and neighbours, children in the street, creating a pictorial documentary of a community at a particular moment in time. Historian, Sir Simon Schama described him as ‘Visual Poet - chronicler, champion, witness of a gone world - one of Britain's great photo-journalists’ (Schama 2015). Phillips later worked as a freelance photographer for magazines including Harper's Bazaar. His photographs have been exhibited at galleries worldwide, including London's Victoria and Albert Museum (2015), The Tabernacle (2017), and Southbank Centre (2021). In 2014 he was shortlisted for the prestigious Deutsche Börse Photography Prize. In 2021 his work featured in the survey show, Life Between Islands: Caribbean-British Art 1950s-Now (Tate Britain). However, despite this success, Phillips was never overly concerned with archiving his achievements and few photographs have survived his European peregrinations. For example, all his photographs of Jimi Hendrix at the Isle of Wight festival in 1970 were lost as he moved from squat to squat. His recent exhibition, How Great Thou Art, documenting 50 years of African Caribbean funerals in London, was the outcome of research by two other photographic professionals whom Phillips knew, who sifted through his old boxes in an attempt to help him de-clutter his life. The exhibition was crowdfunded through Kickstarter and presented at London's National Theatre in 2018.
Phillips was appointed OBE in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to photography and the arts. Charlie Phillips currently lives and works in London, England. His work is represented in UK public collections including V&A, Tate, and London Transport Museum. His portrait by photographer Aliyah Otchere was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, London in 2021.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Charlie Phillips]
Publications related to [Charlie Phillips] in the Ben Uri Library