Cyril Arapoff was born Kirill Semenovich Arapov in Warsaw, Congress Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire (now Poland) in 1898. Arapoff and his mother fled Soviet Russia for England in 1919, feeling threatened because of the family's Tsarist connections and sympathies. By 1935, he was considered the leading portrait photographer in Oxford, receiving commissions for publications such as Vogue, Geographical Magazine and Picture Post; he subsequently worked in the field of documentary photography.
Photographer and documentary filmmaker Cyril Arapoff was born Kirill Semenovich Arapov in Warsaw, Congress Kingdom of Poland, Russian Empire (now Poland) in 1898. The son of a high-ranking Russian diplomat of noble descent, Arapoff spent his childhood in Florence, where his father was the country's Consul. Following his father`s death in 1909, he returned to Russia with his mother and brother Petr. Arapoff and his mother fled Soviet Russia for England in 1919, feeling threatened because of the family's Tsarist connections and sympathies. Arapoff spent much of the late 1920s and early 1930s in Paris and Germany. He was fluent in four languages and at first made his living through tutoring. He developed an interest in photography in the early 1930s and spent six months learning the techniques of the craft at Annelise Kretschmer's studio in Dortmund.
Most probably following Hitler's rise to power, Arapoff returned to England in 1933 and settled in Oxford, where his mother was governess to the Naryshkins, a Russian émigré family. Captain Vadim Naryshkin was a Lecturer in French at Brasenose College. Arapoff established a studio at the Naryshkins' house and, by 1935, was considered the leading portrait photographer in Oxford. His customers included Marghanita Laski, Vivien Leigh, John Gielgud and John Profumo. Arapoff also executed a number of fashion shoots for Vogue magazine. In 1935 he exhibited ‘a remarkable series of photographs' at the Ward Gallery in London, revealing ‘[…] his acute perception of the ‘vital’ elements of the scene’ (Gordon 1935 p. 10). As well as studio work, Arapoff became involved in ballet and theatrical photography and took multiple photographs of the city of Oxford. Arapoff also developed an interest in documentary photography, which was becoming firmly established as a separate genre in England in the mid-1930s. In 1937, around 4,000 Basque children came to Britain as refugees from the Spanish Civil War, and some came to live at St Joseph's, now Westfield House, in Aston, near Bampton. Arapoff took more than forty striking photographs of these child refugees.
London was, however, the major source of Arapoff's documentary work, and he undertook a number of commissions for illustrated magazines such as Geographical Magazine and Picture Post (established by Hungarian émigré, Stefan Lorant, and known for its pioneering use of photography and photo-journalism). These series covered diverse topics such as the River Thames, London's Caledonian Market, hop-pickers at Kentish farms and the East End slum tenements. Arapoff also worked with émigré photographer and cinematographer, Wolf Suschitzky (1912-2016) who recalled: 'I had little contact with those other photographers when I came over initially, apart from Bill Brandt [...], and Cyril Arapoff who was occasionally a camera operator for me on films and he was a very good photographer' (London Independent Photography, 18 Street Life, Spring 2011, p. 15). Arapoff regularly exhibited his work at London galleries, receiving many awards and positive reviews. R. F. Hunter Limited, the British importer of his German Rollieflex camera, sponsored a major exhibition of Arapoff's works in London in return for the use of the name in its advertising. In 1939, Arapoff joined the Strand Film Unit, first as a photographer and later as an assistant cameraman. He eventually closed his Oxford studio and moved to London. In 1942 he joined the official Crown Film Unit and embarked on a documentary film career that took him to Brazil in the 1950s and back to the British National Coal Board Film Unit from 1961 onwards. He was naturalised British in 1949. Arapoff died in London in 1976 and is buried in Hampstead cemetery. More than 4,000 of Arapoff's negatives are held in the Oxfordshire County Council’s Photographic Archive. The Museum of London has 475 Arapoff prints and negatives, mainly relating to London subjects. Coincidentally, one of Arapoff's photographs (unidentified) was offered in Ben Uri's annual fundraising Picture Fair in 1969.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Cyril Arapoff]
Publications related to [Cyril Arapoff] in the Ben Uri Library