The political image

An anti-fascist activist and Communist all her life, Edith Tudor-Hart saw photography as a tool for propagating her strong political ideas.

She considered the camera to be a weapon for documenting social injustices like poverty, unemployment, displacement, slum housing and civil unrest. Photography was, for her, “a living art form that involved people”; it was not “an instrument for recording events,” but “the means to bring events about and to influence them.”

Working in Vienna, London, Wales, and Scotland, Tudor-Hart adopted an unpretentious documentary-style realism to reveal the dark underbelly of a war-ravaged society. She regularly visited the city slums where poor people lived; and flea markets where they bargained for and bought cheap things. She particularly had a soft corner for the labourers, homeless, unemployed, diseased and the suffering.

Modern critics are surprised by the power of her photos and the variety of locations she was able to access. Her portrayal of children and women on the streets; underprivileged folks in their homes and dock have become important visual documents of the time.

‘Child Staring into Bakery Window’ is among her most moving and popular images from the 1930s. Taken in Whitechapel, London, it shows a heart-wrenching picture of a dishevelled child watching hungrily at the stock displayed in a bakery. The image became famous and was reproduced in a number of socialist propaganda pamphlets.

Double life

In the best tradition of documentary photography, Tudor-Hart would be at the right place at the right time. When demonstrations were banned in May 1933, and the central parts of Vienna were barricaded, she was ready with her camera to capture moments of heightened political tension as protesting marchers converged on the city centre. When refugee children came from civil war-ravaged Spain by boat to Southampton, she was there to record their plight.

Edith, who was born and raised in a working-class district of Vienna, was inspired by socialist ideals from early days. Her father Wilhelm Suschitzky owned the first socialist bookshop in Vienna; he was a free thinker and fought for women’s rights, sexual education and birth control. Edith Suschitzky who studied photography at the Bauhaus Art School in Germany, came under police scanner and was arrested in May 1933 for her Communist activities and on suspicion of spying. Three months after her arrest, she married an English doctor, Alexander Tudor-Hart, and fled to London to avoid prosecution and persecution in Austria.

Later on, she helped her brother, Wolfgang Suschitzky, also to escape to London. When Edith and Wolfgang fled to England, a broken-hearted Wilhelm is said to have shot himself in Vienna in 1934. Edith was, however, able to rescue her mother, whom she eventually got out of Austria in 1938.

In England, Tudor-Hart continued to work diligently producing and publishing photographs which covered societal issues. She evocatively framed the current environment burdened with economic hardship and social decline. “Her pictures,” as an observer points out, “clearly stood out from the mainstream of British photography, characterised at that time by a bourgeois, somewhat sweet and sentimental aesthetic.”

Tudor-Hart was also drawn to work with children and record issues of child welfare, health and education, for which she received commissions from agencies such as the British Medical Association, and the National Baby Welfare Council. According to an observer, “These contemplative images of children’s lessons and play are more social optimism than criticism, and suitably concluded a photographic career that remained dedicated to her socialist principles.”

Historians have recorded how art and politics got intertwined in Tudor-Hart’s life; and how her connections with the so-called Cambridge Ring (which was engaged in passing British intelligence secrets to the Soviet Union in the 1930s and 1940s) ultimately eclipsed to a large extent her profile as a sensitive photographer and socially conscious activist.

Tudor-Hart’s marriage broke up in 1940. She was left to survive on her own, and also take care of her son Tommy, who suffered from an incurable schizophrenia. She herself suffered melancholia and mental breakdown, besides facing financial hardship. For a while, she became a housekeeper before setting up a small antiques shop in Brighton.

In 1951, Tudor-Hart was interrogated by the British military intelligence for her role as a Soviet spy. Following the questioning, she destroyed many of the prints she had made in Vienna. Although never arrested, she remained under constant surveillance. She stopped publishing photos by the end of the 1950s, presumably at the behest of the British secret service. One of the most intriguing characters of interwar Europe, Tudor-Hart finally succumbed to liver cancer and died in Brighton on May 12, 1973, aged 65.

Interest in Tudor-Hart’s photography has revived in recent years, especially with the publication of Edith Tudor Hart: In the Shadow of Tyranny, in December 31, 2013; and her retrospective exhibitions at the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh (2013); and Wien Museum, Vienna (2014).

Family in photography

Edith’s brother Wolfgang, who became a well-known photographer himself, always acknowledged how his sister had a great influence on his art. He survived her for more than four decades, before dying in London last year, aged 104. A celebrated documentary photographer as well as a cinematographer of films such as Ulysses (1967), Ring of Bright Water (1969), and Get Carter (1971), Wolfgang received, among others, a Bafta special award for his cinematography (2012).

Continuing the photographic legacy is Wolfgang’s son, Peter Suschitzky (b.1941), an award winning cinematographer known for his work on films like Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980); Dead Ringers (1988); Naked Lunch (1991) and Tale of Tales (2015). Last year, he was presented with the Pierre Angénieux Award for his work in cinematography.

Edith Tudor-Hart was also a great aunt of Peter Stephan Jungk (b.1952). Author of Die Dunkelkammern der Edith Tudor-Hart (The Dark Rooms of Edith Tudor-Hart), Jungk also directed the documentary Tracking Edith (2016), a film which tried to unravel the mysteries of Tudor-Hart’s life in Austria, Great Britain, and Russia, “about which even those closest to her knew nothing.”