Artwork Title: Portraits of Edith Tudor-Hart, Vienna

Portraits of Edith Tudor-Hart, Vienna, 1928

Rudolf Bauer

When Edith Tudor-Hart wasn’t working as a Soviet agent, she was taking lovingly realistic portraits of London’s workers and street children. Being a Soviet agent doesn’t seem to have come naturally to the photographer Edith Tudor-Hart (née Suschitzky). For one thing she used the code name “Edith”, which was not subtle.... She was, nevertheless, successful in one important regard: she is thought to have recruited Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge Five. [She broke] the mould of static, studio-based portraits of children by introducing a more naturalistic style which showed them in their own environments, such as her photograph of children being treated for rickets using ultraviolet light. It was more that because Special Branch had her under surveillance (doing so until her death, in 1963), the Ministry of Information blacklisted her work and Fleet Street followed its lead. (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/9897504/Edith-Tudor-Hart-the-Soviet-spy-with-a-conscience.html)
Uploaded on Dec 1, 2016 by Suzan Hamer

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