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This is an account of how a local authority archive acquired the print collection of a studio photographer and some of the implications arising from the decision to exhibit it. Lambeth Archives obtained the Harry Jacobs archive of several thousand portrait photographs in 1999 upon his retirement. The collection was distinctive and significant because Jacobs had become a photographer in Brixton in the late 1950s just as the major migration of people from the Caribbean to urban Britain in general and to South London in particular was getting under way. Jacobs was from a Jewish family out of East London but he became the de facto studio photographer for this nascent black community just as Brixton, in the borough of Lambeth, was becoming a major centre for, particularly, Jamaican settlement. Many of the passengers on the Empire Windrush, the first boat to bring post-war migrants from the Caribbean to England in 1948, had settled in this area of South London and these Caribbean and West African communities continued to grow throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Today Brixton rivals Harlem in New York in the popular imagination as an iconic black urban centre; it has become shorthand for "Black London" or arguably "Black Britain". The Jacobs' photographic archive provides an unselfconscious record of the growth and aspirations of this black community from the late 1950s until 1999.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230234468_15

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