My mother, Joyce Edwards, who has died aged 99, was a photographer and the landlady of a ramshackle Hampstead home whose actor and artist tenants she captured in thousands of recently discovered portraits.
She supported artists and actors with reasonable rents so that they could concentrate on their careers; among those were Ivor Cutler, the celebrated Scottish humorist; the actor Elizabeth Shepherd; Vladek Sheybal, a James Bond screen villain; and the actor Henry Woolf, a close friend of the playwright Harold Pinter.
Born in Darlington, County Durham, where her father was working briefly before returning home to Ipswich, in Suffolk, Joyce was the daughter of Elsie (nee Postle) and John Fisher, a civil servant. She went to a local convent school, then studied at Ipswich Art School until moving to London in 1945.
While staying at a hostel in Chelsea, she met Jack Edwards, also a civil servant, and they began a relationship and had a son, me, with Joyce changing her surname by deed poll.
In 1949, her father bought her a ramshackle house near Hampstead Heath in north London. Joyce, Jack and I moved into the basement, and the upper floors were rented out. After my parents separated in 1957, Joyce took up photography.
She bought a Rolleiflex camera and began taking photographs of me and others, including her tenants, later moving on to more compact cameras. She set up a makeshift darkroom next to her bedroom, lovingly creating fine prints.
In the early 1970s, she sought advice at the Camden Camera Club but did not enjoy the male-dominated environment. The group occasionally hired models for “figure studies”, and in one session Joyce turned her lens on to the men sweating behind their cameras, the sequence winning first prize in a national competition held by Amateur Photographer magazine in 1973.
She found a more sympathetic environment at Camden Co-optic, taking part in group shows there, and at evening classes at the Mary Ward Centre in Queen’s Square, Bloomsbury.
At the age of 55, Joyce discovered a community of squatters in Bethnal Green, east London, and it became a major portrait project. A photographer friend, Bob Phillips, later helped her digitise these images and collect them in a book, Late 1970s London Counter Culture, published in 2010.
Joyce continued to take photographs, participate in shows at home and abroad, and meet with friends from her groups to discuss their work until the end of her life. However, the extent of her collection, in particular the early images, was not known until recently.
In the last few months of her life, a friend and film-maker, Derek Smith, with a view to mounting a small exhibition for her centenary, went through the boxes of prints, contact sheets and negative files stashed throughout the house, and was amazed by the volume and quality of her work. He is now making a documentary of her life and work, and a solo show of her photographs is planned for 2025.
Joyce is survived by me and a grandson, Antony.
