My mom, Joyce Edwards, who has died aged 99, was a photographer and the landlady of a ramshackle Hampstead dwelling whose actor and artist tenants she captured in hundreds of just lately found portraits.
She supported artists and actors with affordable rents in order that they may think about their careers; amongst these have been Ivor Cutler, the celebrated Scottish humorist; the actor Elizabeth Shepherd; Vladek Sheybal, a James Bond display screen villain; and the actor Henry Woolf, a detailed good friend of the playwright Harold Pinter.
Born in Darlington, County Durham, the place her father was working briefly earlier than returning dwelling to Ipswich, in Suffolk, Joyce was the daughter of Elsie (nee Postle) and John Fisher, a civil servant. She went to a neighborhood convent college, then studied at Ipswich Artwork College till transferring to London in 1945.
Whereas staying at a hostel in Chelsea, she met Jack Edwards, additionally a civil servant, they usually started a relationship and had a son, me, with Joyce altering her surname by deed ballot.
In 1949, her father purchased her a ramshackle home close to Hampstead Heath in north London. Joyce, Jack and I moved into the basement, and the higher flooring have been rented out. After my mother and father separated in 1957, Joyce took up pictures.
She purchased a Rolleiflex digital camera and started taking images of me and others, together with her tenants, later transferring on to extra compact cameras. She arrange a makeshift darkroom subsequent to her bed room, lovingly creating high quality prints.
Within the early Nineteen Seventies, she sought recommendation on the Camden Digicam Membership however didn’t benefit from the male-dominated setting. The group often employed fashions for “determine research”, and in a single session Joyce turned her lens on to the lads sweating behind their cameras, the sequence profitable first prize in a nationwide competitors held by Novice Photographer journal in 1973.
She discovered a extra sympathetic setting at Camden Co-optic, collaborating in group exhibits there, and at night lessons on the Mary Ward Centre in Queen’s Sq., Bloomsbury.
On the age of 55, Joyce found a group of squatters in Bethnal Inexperienced, east London, and it turned a significant portrait challenge. A photographer good friend, Bob Phillips, later helped her digitise these pictures and accumulate them in a ebook, Late Nineteen Seventies London Counter Tradition, printed in 2010.
Joyce continued to take images, take part in exhibits at dwelling and overseas, and meet with mates from her teams to debate their work till the top of her life. Nevertheless, the extent of her assortment, particularly the early pictures, was not identified till just lately.
In the previous few months of her life, a good friend and film-maker, Derek Smith, with a view to mounting a small exhibition for her centenary, went via the packing containers of prints, contact sheets and unfavourable information stashed all through the home, and was amazed by the amount and high quality of her work. He’s now making a documentary of her life and work, and a solo present of her images is deliberate for 2025.
Joyce is survived by me and a grandson, Antony.
