Ben Uri Research Unit

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


Wolf Suschitzky photographer

Wolf Suschitzky was born into a working-class Jewish family in Vienna, Austria in 1912 (the younger brother of photographer Edith Tudor-Hart). Following the rise of anti-Semitism and right-wing violence in Vienna during the 1920s and 1930s, Suschitzky fled to London in 1934, returning in 1935, after a year in Amsterdam. He built a career as a photo-journalist, street journalist and cinematographer with celebrated photographs including a series on Charing Cross Road and working on films including Mike Hodges' thriller 'Get Carter' (1971).

Born: 1912 Vienna, Austria-Hungary (now Austria)

Died: 2016 London, England

Year of Migration to the UK: 1935

Other name/s: Wolfgang Suschitzky


Biography

Wolf Suschitzky was born into a working-class Jewish family in Vienna in Austria-Hungary (now Austria) in 1912. The family occupied a modest two bed room apartment in a working class district and Wolf and his sister, Edith, shared a bedroom. His father and uncle ran the city’s first Socialist bookshop in the working-class district Favoriten, and the publishing house Anzengruber-Verlag, which specialised in socially critical and pacifist literature (Mayr and Omasta, 2013), but generated only a low income so that money problems were a constant. Suschitzky originally planned to study zoology but instead enrolled on a three-year photography course at Vienna’s Höhere Graphische Bundes-Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt, partly influenced by his elder sister, Edith, who had studied photography at the renowned Bauhaus School in Dessau. As anti-Semitism and right-wing violence gathered strength in Vienna during the 1920s and 1930s, Suschitzky abandoned the city in 1934, recalling that he ‘did not see how I could possibly earn a living [there]’ (cited Mayr and Omasta, 2013). He went to London to visit Edith, who had immigrated to England after marrying the British doctor Alexander Tudor-Hart in 1933 to escape political persecution in Vienna. Unable to remain in London without a work permit, Suschitzky and his first wife, the Dutch photographer Helena ‘Puck’ Voûte, spent a year in Amsterdam, where they opened a photographic studio and took portraits of children in the city’s Jewish quarter.

In 1935 (following the break-up of his marriage), Suschitzky returned alone to London on a student permit. He bought a German Primarflex camera from Pelling and Cross on Baker Street and began working as a freelance photographer for magazines including Weekly Illustrated and the British monthly Lilliput, which employed many émigré photographers including Edith Tudor-Hart, and later, for the legendary Picture Post, founded by Hungarian émigré filmmaker and photojournalist Stefan Lorant in 1938. Suschitzky’s sympathetic treatment of his subjects was probably shaped both by his long-held Socialist views and his ‘outsider’ status as an immigrant, which made him notice details that ‘insiders’ may have ‘overlooked or taken for granted’ (Mayr and Omasta, 2013). Between 1937 and 1938, Suschitzky took a series of photographs of Charing Cross Road which ‘as in the times of medieval guilds, when streets were allocated to a specific trade, housed most of the city’s bookshops’ (Mayr and Omasta, 2013). In this now celebrated series of photographs, which have been compared to Brassaï’s contemporaneous street photography of Paris, Suschitzky not only captured a vanishing London, but also the vanishing world of his own Viennese childhood (Low, 2019). After the February Uprising in 1934, his father had committed suicide, his uncle had faced increasing business difficulties and the family bookshop and publishing house were eventually shut down by the Nazis in 1938 after the Anchluss (Nazi annexation of Austria). Suschitzky quickly made a name for himself as a photojournalist and in 1940 was made an Associate of the Royal Photographic Society. He published approximately 20 books between the late 1940s and early 1950s, including two photography manuals for the ‘How to Do It’ series: Photographing Children, 1940 and Photographing Animals, 1941 (Winckler, 2019).

Suschitzky’s Charing Cross Road photographs also initiated his new career as a cinematographer, after he showed them to Strand Films producer Paul Rotha who gave him a job as a camera assistant to Paul Burnford, a young cameraman director working on a series of films at London Zoo and its countryside branch at Whipsnade (Mayr and Omasta, 2013). Suschitzky’s status as an ‘enemy alien’ meant that, between 1939 and 1942, he was unable to work as a cameraman; however, unlike many other émigrés, he avoided wartime internment by working as a medical and advertising photographer for the pharmaceutical company Burroughs Wellcome. Propaganda requirements meant that cameramen were in short supply and, in 1942, Suschitzky joined Paul Rotha Productions to make films for the Ministry of Information (MoI), including the BAFTA-winning documentary The World Is Rich (1948). Suschitsky gained critical acclaim as a cinematographer with Rotha’s fiction debut, No Resting Place(1951), one of the first British feature films shot entirely on location. As an independent cinematographer, Suschitzky went on to shoot many films, notably Jack Clayton’s Oscar-winning The Bespoke Overcoat (1955), Ken Hughes’ The Small World of Sammy Lee (1962) and Mike Hodges’ thriller Get Carter (1971). In 2014, the BFI celebrated Suschitzky’s 100th birthday with a special screening of his films and he was awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Brighton the same year. Wolf Suschitzky died in London in 2016. Many of his photographs are held by the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Tate and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. In recent years, his photography has featured in exhibitions and displays at Tate Britain, The Photographers’ gallery and the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, and in 2016 (alongside Dorothy Bohm and Neil Libbert) at Ben Uri Gallery’s Unseen: London, Paris, New York, in which curator Katy Barron sought ‘to present each of these metropolitan spaces as encountered and photographed for the first time by an outsider’ (Barron, 2016). Wolf Suschitzky's archive is now with Fotohof in Salzburg.

Related books

  • David Low, ‘Navigating Wolf Suschitzky’s Charing Cross Road’, in Marian Malet, Rachel Dickson, Sarah MacDougall and Anna Nyburg (eds.), Applied Arts in British Exile from 1933: Changing Visual and Material Culture (Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2019), pp. 93-106
  • Julia Winckler, ‘Quite content to be called a good craftsman' – an Exploration of some of Wolf Suschitzky’s Extensive Contributions to the Field of Applied Photography between 1935 and 1955’, in Marian Malet, Rachel Dickson, Sarah MacDougall and Anna Nyburg (eds.), Applied Arts in British Exile from 1933: Changing Visual and Material Culture (Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2019), pp. 67-92
  • Daria Santini, The Exiles: Actors, Artists and Writers Who Fled the Nazis for London (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019),p. 48, 50-52
  • Katy Barron, Unseen London, Paris, New York: Photographs by Wolfgang Suschitzky, Dorothy Bohm and Neil Libbert (London: Ben Uri Gallery & Museum, 2016)
  • Michael Berkovitz, Jews and Photography in Britain (Austin: University of Texas, 2015)
  • Brigitte Mayr and Michael Omasta, Wolf Suschitzky: Seven Decades of Photography (Vienna: Synema Publikationen, 2014)
  • Brigitte Mayr and Michael Omasta, ‘A Lucky Man. Wolf Suschitzky – Photographer and Cameraman’, in Charmian Brinson and Richard Dove (eds.), German-speaking Exiles in the Performing Arts in Britain after 1933 (Boston: Brill Rodopi, 2013), pp. 253-273
  • Paul O’Reilly, ‘World of Plenty: The Cinematography of Wolfgang Suschitzky’, Visual Culture in Britain, Vol. 13, No. 2, 2012, pp. 249-268.

Public collections

Related organisations

  • Graphische Bundes-Lehr-und Versuchsanstalt, Vienna (student)
  • Lilliput (photographer)
  • Picture Post (photographer)
  • Paul Rotha Productions (cinematographer)
  • Royal Photographic Society (Associate)
  • Weekly Illustrated (photographer)

Selected exhibitions

  • Edith Tudor-Hart and Wolfgang Suschitzky, Tate Britain, London (2019)
  • Unseen London, Paris, New York: Photographs by Wolf Suschitzky, Dorothy Bohm and Neil Libbert, Ben Uri Gallery, London (2016)
  • Wolfgang Suschitzky’s London, The Photographers’ Gallery, London (2016)
  • Wolf Suschitzky: Seven Decades of Photography, Austrian Cultural Forum, London (2014)
  • Another London: International Photographers Capture City Life 1930-1980, Tate Britain, London (2012)
  • How We Are: Photographing Britain, Tate Britain, London (2007)
  • An Exile’s Eye: The Photography of Wolf Suschitzky, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh (2002)
  Wolf Suschitzky
   
Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Wolf Suschitzky]

Ben Uri library

Publications related to [Wolf Suschitzky] in the Ben Uri Library