Ben Uri Research Unit

for the study and digital recording of the Jewish, Refugee and wide Immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900.


Edith Tudor-Hart photographer

Edith Tudor-Hart (née Suschitzky) was born into a working class Jewish family in Vienna, Austria in 1908; her parents owned a radical bookshop and small publishing house that influenced her decision to become a courier and activist for the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ). In 1925, she took up a three-month children's education course in London, prior to studying photography at the Bauhaus in Dessau between 1929 and 1930. She returned to Britain in 1930 and worked prolifically as a photographer focusing on issues of social welfare, housing, the care of disabled children and, post-war, portraiture; she also worked as a Soviet agent, helping to recruit Kim Philby, a member of the Cambridge spy ring.

Born: 1908 Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria)

Died: 1973 Brighton, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1933

Other name/s: Edith Suschitzky, Edith Tudor Hart


Biography

Photographer Edith Tudor-Hart (née Suschitzky) was born into a working class and non-practising Jewish family in Vienna, Austria on 28 August 1908. Her parents owned a radical bookshop, as well as a small publishing house that printed progressive material and this influenced her decision to join the Austrian Communist youth movement. She went on to become a courier and activist for the Communist Party of Austria (KPÖ).

In April 1925, at the age of 16, she left home to take up a three-month course in London with educator Maria Montessori, intending to be a kindergarten teacher. After her return, she studied photography at the Bauhaus in Dessau between 1929 and 1930, under Walter Peterhans, and her politically engaged photographs were first published in Der Kuckuck, Arbeiter-Illustrierte-Zeitung and Die Bühne in the early 1930s, including images taken with a Rolleiflex camera, depicting the deprivations of working-class Vienna and London's East End. By 1930 she was back in Britain, where she met the medical student and fellow Communist, Alexander Tudor-Hart. After attending a demonstration in support of the Workers' Charter in Trafalgar Square, she was suspected of Communist activities and expelled. Upon her return to Vienna in 1931, she was employed as a photographer for the Soviet news agency TASS, also working briefly in a commercial studio. In May 1933 she was arrested in Vienna for political activity but was released and married Tudor-Hart, who travelled to Vienna for the ceremony at the British Consulate, in August, leaving Austria a few weeks later. She is thought to have brought some negatives with her but those that remained behind were later destroyed. Her brother, Wolfgang, left shortly afterwards for Holland, and later joined her in London as a student; her father committed suicide in April 1934. The Tudor-Harts initially lived in Brixton in south London, later moving to Haverstock Hill in north London; they separated by August 1935 and their son was born in 1936.

The modernist designer and entrepreneur Jack Pritchard was an early supporter and introduced her to the editor of The Listener, where her photographs were published from 1933 onwards, as well as in The Social Scene and Design Today, exposing the shocking living conditions, unemployment, disease and hunger endured by the working classes of Vienna, London and the Rhondda Valley in Wales. In 1937 she briefly shared a London studio with the South-African filmmaker Vera Elkan. After his arrival in London, she also collaborated with her brother, Wolf Suschitzky, and in the late 1930s joined Paul Rotha’s film unit as a cameraman. She also did commercial work for companies including Abbatt Toys. Tudor-Hart was a member of the Workers Camera Club and the left-wing Artists International Exhibition with whom she exhibited in 1934 and helped organise the Artists Against Facism exhibition in 1935; her work was also included in a show entitled Modern Photography at Marx House in 1940. In the late 1930s, Tudor-Hart began to focus increasingly on issues of social welfare, housing and the care of disabled children. Her son, Tommy, was schizophrenic and was placed in a mental institution from the age of 11. Her photographs were published in Picture Post and Lilliput, both set up by Hungarian journalist and refugee Stefan Lorant (1910–1997), and were also used as illustrations for Working Class Wives (Margery Spring-Rice, 1939) and Moving and Growing (Ministry of Education, 1953). With the onset of the Second World War, however, photographic work became scarce, her studio was destroyed during the Blitz and she worked briefly as a housekeeper. After the war, like many women exile photographers, her practice also included portrait photography, and although she focused on working-class female sitters, her portraits also included fellow Jewish émigrée, artist and designer Elisabeth Tomalin (c. 1950s, Ben Uri Collection).

Tudor-Hart also worked as a Soviet agent – with various aliases including Betty Gray and the codename 'EDITH' (Brinson and Dove, 2014). She helped to recruit Kim Philby, a member of the Cambridge spy ring. Following Philby's first arrest in 1952, she burned many of her negatives in order to protect herself after enduring repeated interrogations by MI5 agents. Despite being unable to provide evidence of her espionage, she was eventually forced to abandon photography, resettling in Brighton where she opened an antique shop.

Edith Tudor-Hart died in Brighton, Sussex, England on 12 May 1973. From 1980 onwards, with the publication of Robert Radford's article, 'Edith Tudor-Hart working in the 30s' in Camerawork (July 1980), her life, career and oeuvre as both a photographer and as a Communist spy have been rediscovered. Her great-nephew Peter Stephan Jungk, a Paris-based writer and filmmaker, directed the 2017 documentary film Tracking Edith, which premiered at the Austrian Cultural Forum. Photographs by Tudor-Hart are held in UK public collections including the Ben Uri Collection, the National Galleries of Scotland in Edinburgh, the National Portrait Gallery, Tate and the University of Brighton. A display of photographs by Edith Tudor-Hart and Wolfgang Suschitzky, curated by Kate Bush, Adjunct Photography Curator, was held at Tate Britain in May 2019.

Related books

  • Carla Mitchell and John March, Another Eye: Women Refugee Photographers in Britain after 1933 (London: Four Corners Gallery, 2020)
  • John March, Women Exile Photographers, in Marian Malet, Rachel Dickson, Sarah MacDougall and Anna Nyburg eds., Applied Arts in British Exile from 1933: Changing Visual and Material Culture, The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, Vol. 19 (Leiden/Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2019)
  • Daria Santini, The Exiles: Actors, Artists and Writers Who Fled the Nazis for London (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)
  • Peter Wakelin, Refuge and Renewal: Migration and British Art (Bristol: Sansom and Company, 2019)
  • Peter Stephan Jungk dir., Tracking Edith (documentary, 2017)
  • Charmian Brinson and Richard Dove, A Matter of Intelligence: MI5 and the Surveillance of Anti-Nazi Refugees 1933–50 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014)
  • Duncan Forbes, Anton Holzer and Roberta McGrath eds., Edith Tudor-Hart: In the Shadow of Tyranny (Berlin: Hatje Cantz, 2013)
  • Duncan Forbes, Politics, Photography and Exile in the Life of Edith Tudor-Hart (1908–1973), in Shulamith Behr and Marian Malet eds., Arts in Exile in Britain 1933–1945: Politics and Cultural Identity, The Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies, Vol. 6 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2004)
  • Moving and Growing (London: Ministry of Education, 1953)
  • Margery Spring-Rice, Working Class Wives (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939)

Public collections

Related organisations

  • The Listener (photographer)
  • The Social Scene (photographer)
  • Design Today (photographer)
  • Picture Post (photographer)
  • Lilliput (photographer)
  • AIZ (photographer)
  • Workers Camera Club (member)
  • Artists International Exhibition (member)

Related web links

Selected exhibitions

  • Another Eye: Refugee Women Photographers in Britain after 1933, Four Corners Gallery, London (2020)
  • New Acquisitions and Long Term Loans, Ben Uri Gallery and Museum (2020)
  • Edith Tudor-Hart and Wolfgang Suschitzky, Tate Britain, London (2019)
  • Strange and Familiar: Britain as Revealed by International Photographers, Barbican Art Gallery, on tour to Manchester Art Gallery (2016–2017)
  • Edith Tudor-Hart: In the Shadow of Tyranny, Scottish National Portrait Gallery (2013)
  • Archive City, The Holden Gallery, Manchester (2013)
  • Edith Tudor-Hart: Quiet Radicalism, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool (2013)
  • Look11, Liverpool International Photography Festival (2011)
  • FOTO
  • Modernity in Central Europe, 1918–1945, Scottish National Gallery (2008)
  • Women Photographers in Great Britain 1900–1950, The Photographers' Gallery, London (1987)
  • Solo exhibition, Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool (1987)
  • Artists against Fascism and Against War, Artists' International Association (AIA) (1935)
  • The Social Scene, Artists' International Association (AIA) (1934)
  Edith Tudor-Hart
   
Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Edith Tudor-Hart]

Ben Uri library

Publications related to [Edith Tudor-Hart] in the Ben Uri Library