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Books: Edith Tudor-Hart - In The Shadow Of Tyranny

A book on communist photographer Edith Tudor-Hart shows a rare sense of life in turbulent times, says JOHN GREEN

Books: Edith Tudor-Hart - In The Shadow Of Tyranny

Edited by Duncan Forbes

(Hantje Cantz, National Galleries of Scotland and Wien Museum, £35)

One of the outstanding realist photographers of the 1930s and 40s, Edith Tudor-Hart began taking photos as a young woman in Vienna under her maiden name Suschitzky.

After studying at the Bauhaus in Germany, her photography became more formally self-conscious, with images increasingly incorporating unusual angles and perspectives in starkly contrasting black and white. Once she joined the Communist Party Tudor-Hart turned to social subjects and her camera became a weapon in the struggle against capitalism. Her photos - often reproduced in series - were published in a number of left-wing journals in Austria and Britain.

In the early '30s she fell in love with an English medical doctor Alexander Tudor-Hart and, by marrying him, was able to escape the rising tide of fascism.

Accompanying him to Britain, she continued her work as a photographer, concentrating on poverty in the East End of London, the Welsh mining valleys and elsewhere.

That work was published in the magazines Picture Post, Lilliput and the BBC's The Listener. Her images of working-class families, women and children were characterised by their sense of raw reality and she lent her subjects a sense of dignity. They were not objects of pity.

Because she had worked for the Comintern in Vienna and joined the British Communist Party when she arrived in England, she soon came under MI5 surveillance but, despite constant monitoring and raids on her studio, nothing could be pinned on her.

This book, produced in conjunction with National Galleries of Scotland and the Vienna Museum to accompany recent exhibitions in Scotland and Vienna, provides a fascinating overview of her work.

The depth of contrast Tudor-Hart achieves, her use of natural light and the avoidance of any sense that her subjects are posing became typical of her style.

The people in her shots have an ease and naturalness quite unusual in the photography of the time. In exposing poverty, hardship and exploitation, they are also a strong indictment of the iniquities of capitalism.

While the texts by a range of contributors are factually informative and accurately convey the significance of her work, on a political level they are sometimes anachronistic and inaccurate.

The 1930s Popular Front movement is described by Duncan Forbes as "leading to a deradicalisation" of communist policy and the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) is attacked for showing "scant interest in photography as a political weapon."

Out of context, such retrospective critique ignores the fact that the party here, unlike the KPD in Germany, lacked the means to capitalise on the potential of photography as a propaganda tool.

Tudor-Hart's use of contrasting imagery of rich and poor to make a political point "foundered in Britain," Forbes asserts, "under the political pragmatism of the Popular Front." Yet he seemingly contradicts that view a few sentences further on by stating that Tudor-Hart was associated with two Popular Front formations - The Workers' Film and Photo League, founded in 1934, and The Progressive Photography Group.

Forbes castigates the "conservative populism" of the Popular Front, which "closed down the potential of photography as an agitational tool, enervating its organisational forms and reinstating high cultural norms against more radical aesthetic strategies."

But there is no evidence given for this. In fact, Tudor-Hart was also centrally involved in promoting a worker photography movement in Britain and played an active role in the Artists' International.

The writers also take for granted that she continued her intelligence work for the Comintern in Britain despite being an open and active member of the CPGB.

Aside from the fact that membership of the party precluded any espionage work, no secret service worth its salt - least of all the KGB - would employ such a high profile and politically exposed agent.

Apart from such solecisms, this is a valuable book.

It's richly illustrated with high-quality prints of some of the best of Tudor-Hart's photos and as such it's a striking evocation of turbulent times which were overshadowed by tyranny.

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