My mother once found me standing on my head, trying to get an original view of Doris Day

I have always been fascinated by "the photograph". My mother told me that, as a three-year-old, I would stand and stare at the neatly framed images on the wall. She once found me standing on my head in an attempt to get an original view of a picture of Doris Day.

I was eventually given a camera - perhaps the very first object I owned. It was a gift from my godfather, a keen amateur photographer. It was a box camera, which he gave to me, neatly wrapped, on the day before he left for the US to study medicine. His tutorial on using it was all a muddle, and I was not able to practise photography at that age. Over time, however, I became a collector of pictures, raiding any album I came across.

My collection travelled with me all the way to England, and I still rummage through it, curious about features that have remained through the generations. My favourite photograph is of my great-grandfather, which fascinates if only because his bandy legs were inherited by my grandmother, then my mother, and finally by my eldest daughter. Another picture that amazes me is of my parents' wedding: the newly married couple appear so sad.

Thus I was drawn to "Roots to Reckoning" at the Museum of London, an exhibition of photography by Armet Francis, Neil Kenlock and Charlie Phillips. Their pictures, taken in the 1970s and 1980s, largely capture moods and moments of West Indians in London: severe portraits of our esteemed citizens; snapshots of our uncompromising protests against racism; glimpses of those very casual ways in which our community fashioned itself in a very strange land. The famous and infamous sit uneasily side by side, from the distinguished Lord Pitt to the convicted murderer Michael X.

The show closes next February, and I would recommend it to anyone with even the remotest interest in the still image. It has been mooted that a photographic archive of London's West Indians should be kept at the museum. Why not advertise publicly asking Caribbean folk to donate their pictures of "tings and times"?

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