Families Photographed: Histories

Harry Jacobs was brought up in the East End and moved to Brixton in the 1950s. He began photographing people in their own homes, before getting his Stockwell studio in about 1965. In an interview in 2004, Harry said: “Our first shop in Granville Arcade was right opposite

Geneva and Somerleyton Roads where most of the black people were living. They already knew my brother’s jewellery shop, so going out knocking door-to-door, they were my obvious customers. “I used to do my spiel. I’d get the woman at the door and explain what I was doing, taking photographs… And then I’d arrange to go back in the evening; the whole family would be there in the front room in their best clothes.

Harry Jakobs photographed their rites of passage: christenings, marriages, graduation ceremonies and funerals.

Harry never turned a job down and tens of thousands of local people passed before that famous studio

backdrop which many people believed was a view of somewhere in the Caribbean but which actually he bought from a wallpaper shop in Peckham.

“I’d put Photo-flood bulbs in the light sockets, burn about a pound’s worth of their electricity and take the photos.” For any black celebrity visiting Brixton, from the Jamaican High Commissioner on down, a visit to Jacobs’ studio for a photo-shoot was one of those thing which you just did. Here boxer Frank Bruno poses with his manager Terry Lawless in 1985. When Harry finally retired in 1999 he left some 5,000 anonymous portrait photos stapled to the walls of his office and studio. This remarkable ‘community archive’, the record of over 40 years’ work, was carefully removed and is now preserved at Lambeth Archives.