Ronald Phillips (born 22 November 1944), better known as Charlie, also known by the nickname Smokey,Ross Shiel, "Roots to Reckoning – Charlie Phillips engages the past" , Jamaica Gleaner, 9 October 2006. is a Jamaican-born restaurateur, photographer, and documenter of black London. He is now best known for his photographs of Notting Hill during the period of West Indian migration to London; however, his subject matter has also included film stars and student protests, with his photographs having appeared in Stern, Harper's Bazaar, Life and Vogue and in Italian and Swiss journals. Notable recent shows by Phillips include How Great Thou Art, "a sensitive photographic documentary of the social and emotional traditions that surround death in London's African Caribbean community".
His work has been exhibited at galleries including Tate Britain, Museum of London, Nottingham's New Art Exchange, Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit"Becoming: Photographs from the Wedge Collection. Curated by Kenneth Montague; September 12 through December 28, 2008" , MOCAD. and Museum of the City of New York,Karen Rosenberg, "Glimpses of Urban Landscapes Past – ‘London Street Photography' at Museum of the City of New York" (review), The New York Times, 26 July 2012. and is also in collections at The Wedge, London's Victoria & Albert Museum (V&A), as well as the Tate. A portrait of Phillips by photographer Aliyah Otchere was acquired by the National Portrait Gallery, London in 2021.
Phillips was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2022 New Year Honours for services to photography and the arts.
Early years Born in Kingston, Jamaica, Phillips spent his early childhood with his grandparents in St Mary after his parents had migrated to Britain. He developed an early interest in naval matters: "We used to wait for the tour ships to come in and we used to try and sell them something or try and escort them somewhere or show them around Kingston harbour. At that time Kingston was a main shipping port in the Caribbean.... Every afternoon after school I used to go down to the pier and watch different ships coming in. It was the era of big immigration to England.""Charlie Phillips Story", Moving Here Stories, The National Archives. (From a contribution at Reminisence Conference on the History of West Indian Seamen, held at Museum in Docklands, 28 February 2004.) At the age of 11, Phillips too made the journey from Jamaica to England, sailing on the Reina del Pacifico, a Pacific Steam Navigation Company passenger ship: "This was a one of my most memorable experiences.... We visited different ports.... We visited Cuba, Bermuda, and I saw Santander in Spain and we ended up in Plymouth. Ever since then I've had a fascination for ships and docks and the sea."
He joined his parents in London, on 17 August 1956, and the family lived among other West Indian immigrants in Notting Hill, at the time a poor area of the capital characterised by Rachmanism and racism.Charlie Phillips page at Akehurst Creative Management. Phillips recalls: "We lived at number 9 Blenheim Crescent, and we had to share a room with two strangers, in what they called a double room. It was a refuge point for a lot of people who came here and didn't have anywhere to stay at first." He says: "I was an altar boy at a church called St Michael when Kelso Cochrane was buried [on 6 June 1959] – one of the biggest funerals in Notting Hill at the time. It was just after the race riots and because my parents thought there would be trouble that's the only day I didn't go to the procession. These were the days where for coloured people it wasn't safe to walk on the street, especially when Oswald Mosley was at his peak."
Phillips worked in his parents' restaurant "Las Palmas" in Portobello Road. Notwithstanding early dreams to become a naval architect or an opera singer,Andrew Steeds, "Regrets? He's had a few … A profile of Charlie Phillips, photographer and contributor to 100 Images of Migration", Migration Museum Project, 26 August 2015. he began his photographic career by accident when, while still very young, he was given a Kodak Brownie by a black American serviceman. Phillips taught himself to use it ("I bought a book from Boots on how to take photos and learnt from my mistakes")Kraemer, Daniel, "Old school photographer Charlie Phillips tells student snappers to ‘take their art to another dimension, East End Citizen, 23 March 2016. . and began to photograph life in Notting Hill,Charlie Phillips biography , itzCaribbean.com. making his prints in the family bathroom after his parents had retired to bed.
1960s–1980s After joining the Merchant Navy for a while (serving as a galley boy and developing an interest in marine biology and maritime history), Phillips travelled widely in Europe, to Sweden, Switzerland, France and Italy. Caught up in the protest movements of the late 1960s, he took photographs of the student riots in Paris and Rome. He also took paparazzi-style pictures of celebrities including Omar Sharif, Gina Lollobrigida and Muhammad Ali. After meeting Federico Fellini, Phillips was given work as an extra in the 1969 film Satyricon. He worked as a freelance photographer for magazines — "An agency would take some of my work. You'd get two or three quid, which was survival" — and had his first exhibition in Milan in 1972, entitled Il Frustrazi"How Great Thou Art – 50 years of African Caribbean Funerals in London", Photofusion. and portraying the lives of urban migrant workers.
Returning to London after several years, Phillips lived "a bohemian life of squats and pop festivals". Described as "A card carrying member of the 'sex, drugs and rock n roll era, he ended up at a party where he took photographs of Jimi Hendrix but ironically could get no British news editor to publish them.Ameena M. McConnell, "Charlie Phillips gets 'Rootical' in London's Portobello Road…", APHROBRIT, 14 August 2011. Throughout the 1960s he documented aspects of urban life in Notting Hill and the shifts taking place in the cultural landscape, including racial integration and the birth of Carnival."Important Afro-Caribbean photographic archive acquired for Museum of London with Art Fund help", Artfund, 1 October 2009.
Throughout the 1980s, Phillips regularly took photographs that document West Indian funerals, at Kensal Green Cemetery"A Black Funeral" by Charlie Phillips at the Museum of London's Postcodes Project. . and elsewhere, which have been collected together under the title How Great Thou Art: 50 Years of Afro-Caribbean Funerals."How great thou art: 50 years of Afro-Caribbean funerals – in pictures", The Guardian, 25 July 2014. In 1988, he moved to south London and opened a diner at 131 Wandsworth High Street, Wandsworth, called Smokey Joe's, which often featured in restaurant guides,Helen Fielding, "EATING OUT: The Caribbean cool shoulder", The Independent, 2 April 1995. running it for 11 years, while building up a collection of shipping memorabilia but not pursuing his career as a photographer, demoralised by not being able to get his work published.Angela Cobbinah, "Charlie Phillips: Photographer", Thoughts, words and images, 25 October 2012.
1990s–present Notting Hill in the Sixties A revival of interest in the work of Charlie Phillips came with it being featured in an exhibition at the Tabernacle, Notting Hill, in 1991, coinciding with the launch of his book of photographs Notting Hill in the Sixties. Introduced by writer Mike Phillips (no relation), the book includes photographs of everyday life in the area, covering poor housing conditions, musical entertainment and political activism.
The Urban Eye Curator Paul Goodwin, speaking of the work in the 2013 exhibition Charlie Phillips: The Urban Eye (a 2014 Deutsche Börse Photography Prize nomination),Anne Castleton, "Nine new cross-University professors appointed at UAL" (biography of Paul Goodwin, Professor of Black Art and Design), University of the Arts London, 6 January 2014. Retrieved 11 November 2021. compared Phillips' significance to that of documentary photographers such as Markéta Luskačová, Shirley Baker and Tom Wood, saying: "Each photograph tells 'other' stories...about the rise of modern multicultural London and the migrant experience in the city.""A view through the Urban Eye of Charlie Phillips at Nottingham's New Art Exchange", Culture 24, 19 April 2013. Reviewing the exhibition in the Nottingham Post, Mark Patterson called it "a reminder of a London and an England that has almost been wiped out of existence by redevelopment; a country where the business-driven 'regeneration' imperative has squeezed out authenticity and local texture. And for London, read Nottingham and many other towns and cities."Mark Patterson, "Art: Charlie Phillips – the Urban Eye" , Nottingham Post, 25 April 2013.
How Great Thou Art: 50 Years of African Caribbean Funerals in London Phillips' show How Great Thou Art: 50 Years of African Caribbean Funerals in London opened in November 2014 at Photofusion Gallery in Brixton, curated by Eddie Otchere and Lizzy King, with support from Arts Council England's Grants for the Arts Fund.
Hungry Eye magazine stated: "Photographer Charlie Phillips presents a sensitive photographic documentary of the social and emotional traditions that surround death in London's African Caribbean community. How Great Thou Art represents a lifetime's work by Charlie.""How Great Thou Art: 50 Years Of African Caribbean Funerals In London", Hungry Eye, 20 October 2014. The reviewer for The Root praised the exhibition as "a collection of beautifully evocative, powerfully elegiac images", describing Phillips as "a rare breed who combines the adventurous, pioneering spirit and perennial resilience of the hardy immigrant (he came to Britain in the 1950s) with the sensitive eye of the aesthete and a longing to transmute the banal, the prosaic and the unpalatable in ordinary existence into a thing of ineffable beauty."
Accompanying the publication of a limited-edition book of the same title (successfully funded by Kickstarter),Eddie Otchere, "Charlie Phillips presents How Great Thou Art", Kickstarter. How Great Thou Art has been called "a new landmark in British photography. The question of life and death and the cultural responses to death through funerals in the Caribbean community has featured sporadically in various photographic oeuvres before but no one has explored this subject in such depth and in such a participatory and embedded manner as evidenced by Charlie Phillips."Paul Goodwin, "The Art of Charlie Phillips", foreword in How Great Thou Art: Fifty Years of African Caribbean Funerals in London, King/Otchere Productions, 2014. In The Spectator, Ian Thomson wrote: "In Phillips's moving and often beautiful images, dating from 1962 to the present, the bereaved are seen to face the mystery of the end of life in stush black suits, spidery hat veils, Rastafari head-ties, spiffy trilbies and strictly-come-dancehall white socks.... Anyone feeling a bit like death in the run-up to Christmas should invest in a copy of How Great Thou Art — and feel revivified."Ian Thomson, "Death wears bling: the glory of London's Caribbean funerals" , The Spectator, 29 November 2014.
In October 2023, How Great Thou Art opened in Mayfair, central London, at the Centre for British Photography, the first time a solo exhibition has been presented in main space there.
Heart of the Community