In 1951, Roger Mayne graduated from Oxford University with a degree in physics. He soon veered away from the sciences, however, and threw himself into photography. Mayne took to traveling in and out of St. Ives, in Cornwall, which was then a budding artists’ town; he took photographs of residents as well as the scattered youth loitering in the streets—smoking cigarettes, clambering onto trucks, playing paddle tennis. He did the same in London’s Southam Street, where he shot the working class of postwar England; the pictures still live on in Britain’s collective memory. In the Courtauld’s first-ever photography show, 40 of Mayne’s works from the 1950s and 60s are on view, including those taken on his honeymoon in Spain and at his family home in Dorset. —Elena Clavarino