Born: Edith Suschitzky, August 28, 1908, Vienna, Austro-Hungarian Empire (now Austria)
Died: May 12, 1973, Brighton, UK
Matriculated: 1928
Locations: Austria, Sweden, Germany, France, Italy, UK
Looking at her 1931 photograph “Prater Ferris Wheel,” one could be forgiven for thinking that Edith Tudor-Hart—still Edith Suschitzky at the time—was László Moholy-Nagy’s Bauhaus student. Seen through a lattice of iron and steel, its view from above on tiny café tables and distant spaces of modern leisure seems a Viennese take on Moholy-Nagy’s Berlin Radio Tower from just three years earlier. But Moholy-Nagy had already left the Bauhaus prior to Suschitzky’s fall 1929 matriculation. Still, she would have encountered his work in others’ teaching, his own publications, and the 1930 Vienna showing of FiFo (Film und Foto, the Werkbund’s film and photography exhibition). And while urban structures and modern technology clearly interested Tudor-Hart, the lasting legacy of her powerful photographic oeuvre is something else entirely: her skill in capturing humanity with empathy and grace, and above all in photographing children. Art and politics were almost always linked for Edith Tudor-Hart, who would become a significant British photographer as well as a spy for the KGB, the Soviet secret services. Yet records and knowledge of Edith Tudor Hart’s work have been patchy. Research by Duncan Forbes and Peter Stephan Jungk has done much to bring her work and life back to broader public attention.
Edith Suschitzky grew up in the working-class Viennese district of Favoriten. While just a child during the First World War, she was old enough to understand its impacts and, in its aftermath, to benefit from the district’s positive collective responses; she was among the children from Favoriten sent on extended sojourns to regain their health and strength while living with fruit farmers in Sweden. In 1924, she began unpaid work in Favoriten’s Haus der Kinder Montessori nursery school, through which she became part of a highly politicized leftist milieu. In the spring of 1925, at age sixteen, Suschitzky was sent to London for a three-month Montessori course, her first trip to the country that would eventually become her permanent home. It is unclear when she first became a communist party member, but Forbes located records of her working for the Communist Party of Great Britain as Betty Gray by 1927 and conjectures that she was by that time already connected formally or informally to the KPÖ (Communist Party of Austria).
Suschitzky traveled to both Paris and London in 1929, likely on undercover missions, and she may well have engaged in clandestine activism when, later that same year, she joined the Dessau Bauhaus. She was given student number 385 in the fall and stayed through the spring of 1930 to complete the preliminary course. According to Hannes Meyer’s certificate (Bescheinigung) of her activities during that semester, written on May 22, 1930 and mailed to Suschitzky in London, her classes included introduction to artistic design, material and crafts training (practical workshop), chemistry, mathematics/representational geometry, font/text (schrift), and nude drawing. While it is not mentioned in this transcript of course, Suschitzky was almost certainly among the ten percent of students involved in the KoStuFra, the Communist Student Fraction. The following semester she was not registered as a student but as a “trainee” (Hospitant) in Walter Peterhans’s photography class. Her brother Wolfgang Suschitzky recalled of her Bauhaus period that, “Edith decided to specialize in photography under Walter Peterhans. This turned out to have been one of the most important decisions in her life because she stayed with photography until the end.” Her earliest extant photographs date to 1930, further evidence that she most likely first picked up the craft at the Bauhaus.
Edith Tudor-Hart, “Prater Ferris Wheel,” Vienna, c. 1931
Less than a year after she left, in March of 1931, Suschitzky published an article on the Bauhaus in the trade journal Commercial Art, in which she emphasizes the constructivist and social orientation of the school. “It is recognized that preoccupation about ‘genius’ is rather a waste of time, that the means of expression of our time are entirely different from those of the nineteenth century, that it is undeniably the film rather than the painted picture which has a hold on the masses, that the dance and the play are moving towards collectivism, that what matters is no longer only the ‘star’ but the ensemble.” And indeed, it was this ensemble—the collective—that seemed to catch her eye most often. Working with her twin lens, medium-format Rolleiflex, Suschitzky held the camera at chest height having to look down from above to compose her shot. With the camera like this, and not in front of her face, she created greater opportunities for empathy and exchange with her subjects.
By the early 1930s Suschitzky was employed as a photographic correspondent for the TASS Soviet news agency. Even as Suschitzky began to publish in a range of Austrian and German mainstream and leftist papers, she continued her political work unabated. In May 1933, at the age of twenty-four, she was arrested for the first time when caught working as a secret courier for the KPÖ. She was living at her parents’ home, from which the police confiscated a large amount of photographic material, including photographs of a recent KPÖ demonstration in Vienna. She was permitted release from prison to marry her partner, the British doctor and fellow activist, Alexander Tudor-Hart, in August 1933, on the condition that they would leave Vienna by October of the same year. When they left for England in October, the police released some of her negatives; the rest they destroyed in the late 1930s when their archive was too full.
Edith Tudor-Hart, “Ultraviolet Light Treatment, South London Hospital for Women and Children,” c. 1935
In London, Edith Tudor-Hart was able to obtain commercial work through the designer and Bauhaus-enthusiast Jack Pritchard. For one such commercial project, she collaborated with fellow Bauhaus photographer Grete Stern, herself in exile in London, on a brochure for the South London Hospital for Women and Children. A photograph Tudor-Hart shot for this project shows two nurses tending six toddlers who are receiving ultraviolet light therapy. Like futuristic cherubs, they are naked but for their shoes and protective goggles. Historian Tania Anne Woloshyn has pointed out that Tudor-Hart’s photograph is not only beautiful and eerie; it is a technical feat since direct rays from the carbon arc lamp’s open flame would have ruined the photograph. The photographer positioned herself behind the boy to block direct light, and this perspective makes him the picture’s central subject. His pose, with arms outstretched to receive the light, echoes that of the standing nurse and the other children, perhaps playing airplane; the pose is also Christ-like.
Lilliput, April 1939 issue. Photographs by Edith Tudor-Hart: Poodle Parlour, London, c. 1937, and Gee Street, Finsbury, London, c. 1936
Tudor-Hart’s own son Tommy was born in 1936. When her husband left to serve as a surgeon in the Spanish Civil War, she became the sole provider for her extended family of Austrian refugees. Making ends meet through photography was difficult, but she persevered. The arts and entertainment monthly Lilliput published a pair of her photographs that critique through contrast: while no expense is spared on rich people’s pets, poor families are packed into slums.
In 1950 Tudor-Hart took an extraordinary series of photographs for the British Ministry of Education that were published in the two-volume Moving and Growing. She captures the children at work and play, concentrated, spontaneous, and beautiful.
The 1950s were perhaps the most difficult years of Tudor-Hart’s hard life. She was constantly monitored and frequently interrogated by MI5 as many in her circle of spies were either found out or defected to the Soviet Union. Her son Tommy’s mental health deteriorated, and he had to be institutionalized. She was unable to survive from photography and left the profession to become an antiques dealer, first in London, and then in Brighton. Edith Tudor-Hart never visited the Soviet Union, but extensive records of her decades of work as a spy for that country are believed held in the KGB archives in Moscow. They remain sealed, despite researchers’ attempts to see them.