[The Guardian] The big picture: Roy Mehta's love letter to the London borough of Brent

The big picture: Roy Mehta's love letter to the London borough of Brent

The photographer captures the community spirit of one of Europe’s most multicultural urban areas

Roy Mehta took this photograph of a barbershop in Harlesden, north-west London, in 1991. He was an art student at the time, and the picture was one of thousands of images he took in the borough of Brent, where he grew up. Brent was the most multicultural district of any city in Europe, but Mehta understood it more as a single community. His father had a one-man GP practice in Harlesden for many years and as a kid Mehta would sit after school in the waiting room, already intrigued by the faces.

In the 30 years of his photography career since then, he’d hardly looked at those formative pictures – he had boxes of negatives that he had never printed. When Brent was nominated as borough of culture for 2020, however, Mehta was invited to put together images from that archive for an exhibition and book. He had originally taken the pictures in houses, churches, shops and on the street, wandering with his portrait camera, knocking on doors, or sometimes trailing around with a Catholic priest as he did his house calls. In that pre-internet era, once it had been established he wasn’t from the Inland Revenue, people were happy, as here, for him to stand in a corner and snap away.

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