If you find yourself in a south London front room, you may see a photograph on the sideboard, or in an ornate cardboard frame pinned to the wall, showing family members standing in front of a bucolic backdrop and behind an oversized basket of flowers. The photo, one of approximately 60,000, was taken by my grandfather, Harry Jacobs, some time between the late 1950s and 1999.

Harry Jacobs in his south London studio



Rewind to the summer of 1948, when a ship called the Empire Windrush landed at Tilbury Docks in Essex. Of the 1,000-plus passengers it had brought from the West Indies, more than 300 people would find their way to Lambeth, first sleeping in bunks in the deep-level shelters at Clapham South and then finding work at the labour exchange in Brixton before making their home there.

Soon after the Windrush voyage, Jacobs had come home from the second world war. He came from a Jewish family in the East End but was now living with his mother in south London. Fed up with working at his jewellery shop in Brixton’s Granville Arcade and looking for a new business venture, Jacobs got hold of a camera and walked down the streets around Coldharbour Lane, knocking on doors and offering to take portrait photos.

He quickly became the de facto portrait photographer for the new local Caribbean community. He started by taking shots of families posed in the corner of their front rooms. Later he acquired a studio in Landor Road, in neighbouring Stockwell, from which he continued to photograph local people in front of his perennial studio backdrop for another 40 years.

The backdrop – a bridge over a woodland lake – was made from wallpaper that Jacobs had got from a builders’ merchants. It appears in most of the photos - he would often tell customers that it was a snapshot of Montego Bay in Jamaica or St Kitt’s. As well as this, an oversized basket of fake flowers was usually in shot. This somewhat kitsch studio scenery and the often hurried nature of my grandpa’s studio sessions made for an unguarded and unique final product. Rather than filling a couple of rolls of film, collating contact sheets and inviting subjects to indicate what they considered to be the most flattering shots, he would often just boss the client around until they were smiling in front of “Montego Bay”, before taking a single photograph and telling them to pop back in a few days to collect it.

Students and tutor from the School of Hairweaving, Maxted Road, Peckham

Photography was expensive and few people could afford a camera in the 1950s, so the role of the studio photographer was to depict people as they wanted to be seen. As well as celebratory images of family groups, new babies and weddings, Jacobs’s photos show the sitters in their new uniform – nurses, lawyers or transport workers – or holding cherished certificates. These photographs would be sent to family in the Caribbean as evidence of having made it in England.

While I always delighted in seeing the tools of his trade (a cumbersome flashgun charging alongside scuffed vintage metallic 35mm and medium-format film canisters) on my grandparents’ hallway table when I visited their Herne Hill house for Friday night dinner, my grandad never saw himself as an artist and was even bemused by the interest in his work at the end of his career. These thousands of photos would have ended up in a skip as he prepared to shut up shop, had they not been rescued and archived.

The front window display in the Landor Road studio was a collage of local faces, and schoolkids would pass by daily, proudly pointing themselves out to their mates. Former customers said: “It was a popular place at the time. A lot of West Indians used him, you know, and the rumour goes round among the Caribbean community. In those days, it was early days for us and he was kind enough, mild enough … We must have used him several times. Once we sponsored a christening of a child, another time we took our daughter there, another time on our own, always dressed up for the occasion.”

A boy and a girl with a statue of the Madonna, taken at their first communion

Whenever my granddad’s photos are exhibited, and they are being shown again to mark this year’s 70th anniversary of the Empire Windrush arrival, visitors chance upon forgotten pictures of their younger selves, their families, friends and neighbours. He was well-loved by the black community in Brixton and would often embarrass me and my sister by shouting bad jokes out of his car window at people he had photographed. These often sounded like insults to us as we shrank into our seats, but the response was always laughter and a warm “Hi, Harry”.

He used to tell us his studio was protected by locals during the 1981 Brixton riot, with a group of people gathered outside saying “don’t smash his windows – that’s Harry Jacobs, he’s one of us”. This was one of many (possibly apocryphal) tales he used to reel off, so who knows whether it really happened like that.

Portrait of three young men, taken in 1982

However, he certainly made his mark for a few decades in that part of south London: when my dad and I went to Lambeth Town Hall to register his death in 2011, the registrar – initially cold and a little officious – lightened up when she recognised the name of that Brixton luminary and told us Harry Jacobs had photographed her family.

A Snapshot of Brixton: Harry Jacobs and the Empire Windrush is at Lambeth Town Hall, 1 Brixton Hill, London SW2 1RW. It opens on 25 May and runs until 6 July.