Late summer in London, August Bank Holiday Weekend, can mean only one thing: Notting Hill Carnival. And 2026 is more special than ever for Europe’s largest street carnival, with the event marking its 60th anniversary.
Also marking a significant anniversary: Ian Watts. The Londoner has been photographing the carnival for 50 years. In 1976 he was 'a young teenager, just out of school', living in a youth hostel in Harlesden. Armed with a second-hand East German Praktica, a basic SLR camera, and a bursting curiosity, he made his debut on the streets around Ladbroke Grove.
'The group of guys I was hanging out with said, “Let's go down to Carnival.” In the end, they decided not to go. But I went anyway,' he remembers. 'I shot [mostly] black and white, and also some colour film. And my feeling was: wow, this is a great experience! I was primarily drawn because I'm very interested in sound-system culture and reggae music. But I went on a voyage of discovery.'
Teenage Ian was hooked, and thereafter returned annually. He’s documented every Notting Hill Carnival since – apart from 2012 when, his youthful passion having morphed into an adult professional occupation, his career as a BAFTA- and Grierson-winning director of photography in TV and documentary took him to Siberia.
Now, from an impossibly rich archive of photographs numbering in the tens of thousands, Watts has curated a fraction of his still images – between 100 and 150 – for a free exhibition that’s showing on the towering screens of Outernet at the other, eastern end of central London. ‘Carnival 60: Ian Watts at Outernet’ is a unique record of over half a century of partying, freedom, creativity and social change, the pictures arranged in chronological sections to create an unparalleled, insightful visual narrative. As Scott Neal, creative director of culture and lifestyle at Outernet, puts it: 'The pictures Ian has taken from being a young boy to today, across six decades, are a vibrant record of what Carnival is about and how important it is to the fabric of London.'
It’s a peerlessly vivid, and still evolving, record, one that speaks to a lifelong mission that Watts lays out on his website: in his commitment to documenting the Black diaspora, his work 'explores themes of identity, diaspora, cultural expression and community, capturing both historic moments and everyday life'.
Not that that teenager had such grand ideas in mind. Watts says that he never 'consciously' decided that photographing the carnival would be part of his life’s work.
'Once I had caught the Carnival bug, I thought, well, I’ll go back in 1977 and continue the journey.' But over time, 'it became essential, and nothing else mattered other than going to Carnival every August. Nothing else would be on my agenda. I set my work [and life] schedule to make sure that I was around.'
As it happened, Watts’ first Notting Hill Carnival was the year of a heatwave (1976), and of rioting on the streets around Acklam Road 'under the flyover'. As he recalls, 'there was a lot of tension in the air because of the heat… That might have had some effect as to what happened at Carnival, because there were lots of people getting uptight with the way the police were treating people.'
But when I ask him to highlight his best and worst experiences, he cites two moments in the 1990s.
'I had progressed onto Nikon cameras with Nikon lenses. I tended to shoot the black and white stock on Ilford film, the colour on Kodak stock. But this year I decided I was going to use Fujichrome stock. This is a stock where you shoot transparencies, you take the photograph, and then you have to send it off to Fuji for them to process it, then they post it back to you. And unfortunately, what I think are some of my best photographs of Carnival, I haven't seen – they got nicked or lost in the post.'
As for his best one: 'It's difficult to pinpoint a year but it would also be some point in the 1990s. I started enjoying Carnival in a big way. One of the things I love is going there and you don't know who you're going to bump into. I meet old friends who I haven't seen for years. I always seem to bump into my brother. [There are] people you haven't seen for the whole year and then you miraculously meet them at Carnival.'
And, in his own seventh decade, Ian Watts’ commitment to Carnival is undiminished.
'As long as I can pick up a camera, I'll be taking photographs of Carnival. As soon as I arrive on [the streets], I'm energised and straight into the zone because I just love it. One of the best things for me about the Outernet exhibition,' he adds, 'is seeing that the photographs I took at my first Carnival, shot on that very basic Praktika, have held up. They're not as good as the digital photographs I've taken more recently. But it's nice that you have this record of very old photographs. It just shows my Carnival journey from 1976 right through to 2025.'
Finally: does this Carnival whisperer and sound system expert have any music recommendations for anyone heading to Notting Hill’s teeming, beaming streets this weekend?
'Depending on your taste, there's Brazilian bands, soca bands, reggae bands… But for me there are a couple of sound systems that are really important. I would go for Rapattack. They provide a nice selection of music. And then it's a choice between Channel One and Aba-Shant-I. Two very important sound systems. They play similar forms of music, but they are Carnival stops that I have to make.'
‘Carnival 60: Ian Watts at Outernet’ is free and runs 27 August – September 2026, outernet.com
