Embracing the people: The photography of Edith Tudor Hart

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Tudor Hart photographed the poor and disadvantaged, yet ‘a respectful humanity and optimism generally empowers her work’ says Robert Radford

Edith Tudor-Hart: In the Shadow of Tyranny edited by Duncan Forbes

According to Edith Tudor-Hart,  by the mid-1930s photography had ‘ceased to be an instrument for recording events and became a means for stimulating and influencing events. It became a living art embracing the people’.  This was written in 1936, during the decade of fearful struggle between the forces of Fascism and its opponents throughout Europe. Despite her very English sounding name, she was Austrian by birth and started her career as a politically committed photographer, working in Vienna, as Edith Suschitzky.  She married Alexander Tudor-Hart, a British doctor, and moved to London, when it became clear that she would no longer be safe in Austria on account of her Communist beliefs  and her Jewish origin.

This was a time of growing popularity of illustrated magazines and this was where her work was to be frequently seen. In Vienna she published articles on the poverty of Whitechapel and the Caledonian Road market, headlined as ‘the market of naked misery‘, and yet it is hard to ignore the vitality and personality of the participants, haggling over piles of old shoes, one trader looks just like Steptoe senior (a character in a 1960s British TV sit-com). 

There remains though the undoubted pathos of the underfed, unemployed buskers and the disabled war veterans begging in the streets of both Vienna and London, who were also her subjects.  In the magazine, Lilliput, she shows, in one full-page image, the care and attention bestowed on a dog attending a poodle parlour opposite a full page image of the squalid conditions endured by a family living in an East End basement. Such photographs as that of a young girl, raggedly dressed, unable to turn her eyes from the unobtainable treats in a confectioner’s window, could obviously be used in campaigns for social reform (if not revolutionary change). Yet a respectful humanity and optimism generally empowers her work. A Stepney family, in their overcrowded, claustrophobic room, reveal a grace and determination to survive.

Tudor Hart had been trained as a Montessori teacher and her optimism most obviously prevails in her depiction of children, evident in her images for the ‘Moving and Growing’  project for primary schools.  Although her photographs are generally naturalistic reportage in approach, she had been exposed to ‘the new vision’ in photography during her time at the Dessau Bauhaus  and she was ready to use more dynamic orientations and photomontage to dramatic effect for posters and book covers.

Tudor Hart died in 1973 and there was a real possibility that her work and her example would have disappeared from history had it not been for a pioneering issue of the magazine Camerawork in 1980, followed by an exhibition in 1987 at Liverpool’s Open Eye Gallery (which holds a selection of her prints), and then a book by her brother, photographer and cameraman, Wolf Suschitzky the same year.  Her archive is now preserved by the Scottish National Galleries, the joint promoters with Vien Museum of this attractively presented book, which, with its plates based on modern silver-gelatin and digital inkjet prints, will finally ensure the survival of her reputation.

With the release of information from British and Soviet security files in recent years, it has emerged that Tudor Hart maintained a role as a low-level contact for Comintern (the organization established in Moscow to promote Communism internationally), and had been under surveillance throughout her time in Britain. During the cold war and the major investigations over the ‘Cambridge’ spies (who included Guy Burgess, Kim Philby and the art historian Anthony Blunt), she felt severely threatened and destroyed much of her work, and this has necessarily added to its scarcity; she felt no longer able to continue working as a photographer. 

In the book Duncan Forbes has closely researched the political climate in which she grew up and Anton Holzer examines the photography scene in Vienna. Roberta McGrath, considers her position as a ’new woman’ in shaping her work and commitments, noting her involvement with projects such as the South London Hospital for Women and Children. For all this valuable historical analysis, the personal, inspiring but also tragic story of the woman behind the Rolleiflex still waits to be told.

Edith Tudor-Hart: In the Shadow of Tyranny edited By Duncan Forbes is published by Hatje Cantz in association with National Galleries Scotland and Wien Museum 2013. 153pp., 127 mono illus. ISBN 978-3-7757-3567-4