Roy Mehta

Biography

Roy Mehta is a photographer, Senior Lecturer and Year Lead on BA (Hons) Photojournalism and Documentary Photography at London College of Communication. His work explores identity, belonging, migration and the poetics of everyday life in multicultural Britain, revealing intimate moments of connection, memory and community.

His practice is marked by a restrained visual style that emphasises gesture, atmosphere and empathy over spectacle. His projects, including ‘Revival, London’, ‘Distant Relations’, ‘Coastline’, ‘Sixteen’, ‘The Garden’ and ‘Lockdown’ examine the poetics of everyday life and the complexities of diaspora experience.

His work has been widely exhibited, most notably in the recent major exhibition ‘The 80s: Photographing Britain’ at Tate Britain, which explored a wide range of photographic practices in Britain during the 1980s, and has been the subject of critical writing by curators and scholars such as Mark Sealy and Caryl Phillips.

His photographs are held in the permanent collections of Autograph, Historic England, The Library of Birmingham, The Harris Museum and Art Gallery, and the IKS Collection, Germany.

He also has extensive experience working in the commercial sector for a wide range of clients including Virgin, Tesco, RHS and Sainsbury’s. He has also been commissioned to produce the photography for book covers for many publishers including Penguin, Random House and Faber & Faber for authors such as Salman Rushdie, P.D. James, Orhan Pamuk and Thomas Hardy.

As part of his teaching on BA (Hons) Photojournalism and Documentary Photography, he leads a socially engaged pathway in which students collaborate with a range of charity partners. Reflecting concerns central to his own practice, this pathway explores how students can activate their photography beyond the academic sphere, using documentary practice to engage with wider national conversations around migration, identity and agency.