Island Life: Photographs from the Martin Parr Foundation
Paul Trevor
Born 1947, London
Trevor was a teenage table-tennis champion, and worked as an accountant before turning to photography in the early 1970s. He had no formal photographic education, though he later studied film. In 1973 he co-founded the Exit Photography Group with Chris Steele-Perkins and Nicholas Battye. They believed in the social value of documentary photography, and shared a research grant in 1975 to document inner-city poverty, which resulted in Trevor’s Toxteth photos. The same year, he helped establish the Half Moon Photography Workshop in East London. He has regularly documented the streets, markets and pubs of Brick Lane and Spitalfields – many of his images were published in a book called Once Upon a Time in Brick Lane, and 500 of them are now in the London Metropolitan University’s East End Archive.
