Photographer Norman ‘Normski’ Anderson was born in Camden, Northwest London in 1966. He was bought his first camera by his mother at an auction when he was nine years old and by the age of eighteen he was working as a freelance photographer. His photographs include a personal record of community life in Camden when his mother and step father were living in Primrose Hill.

Normski’s mother, Cynthia Prescod, was born in Jamaica and moved to Britain while the country was still under colonial rule. The British Nationality Act of 1948 gave British citizenship to all people of the Commonwealth, recognising their right to work and settle in the UK by providing them with British passports. By 1981, after increasing restriction on migration from the former British colonies, the act was rewritten so that only people of British citizenship acquired by birth in the UK, descent or naturalisation had the automatic right to live in Britain.

The V&A acquired seven photographs by Normski as part of the Staying Power project. Staying Power is a five year partnership between the V&A and Black Cultural Archives. The project aims to explore black British experience from the 1950s to the 1990s through photographs acquired by the V&A and oral histories conducted by Black Cultural Archives.