Private Passions

Charlie Phillips is a Jamaican-born photographer whose work has been exhibited across the world, and is part of the permanent collections of The Tate and the V&A. He's best known for his photographs of the area of London where he arrived to live as a boy: Notting Hill. His images are full of the atmosphere of Notting Hill in the late 50s and 60s: slum housing, market traders, churchgoers, children playing on the streets - and they're now valued as a unique record of the experience of that Windrush Generation. Later in the sixties, Charlie Phillips photographed the student protests in Paris, pop festivals and rock stars, while making a living as a paparazzo, chasing Elizabeth Taylor around. Simon Schama has described him as a "Visual Poet - chronicler, champion, witness of a gone world - one of Britain's great photo-journalists." But Charlie Phillips didn't set out to be a photographer; instead, he wanted to be an opera singer, and during his time as a paparazzo in Milan he achieved his ambition, singing f