Edith Tudor-Hart, born Suschitzky, was one of the most significant documentary photographers working in Britain in the 1930s and 1940s. Born in Vienna, she grew up in radical Jewish circles. She is the older sister of Wolfgang Suschitzky, an amazing cinematographer and photographer. Edith married Alex Tudor-Hart, a British doctor, and the pair moved to England. There she worked as a documentary photographer, closely associated with the Communist Party, compiling a remarkable archive of images of working people in London and later, the south of Wales. She was also successful in one important regard: she is thought to have recruited Kim Philby, one of the Cambridge Five. (http://blog.burnedshoes.com/tagged/wolfgang+suschitzky) When Edith Tudor-Hart wasn’t working as a Soviet agent, she was taking lovingly realistic portraits of London’s workers and street children..... As a photographer working in the period her success was limited as well, at least in terms of her influence. It wasn’t that Tudor-Hart wasn’t innovative – she was, breaking the mold 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. Yet her work has since become significant.... The photographs have been printed from her negative archive, which was donated by her family in 2004. But because she destroyed her negative lists when Philby was first arrested, not all the figures in the photographs are identifiable. “She seems to have had a nervous breakdown when Philby was arrested,” Duncan Forbes says. “But it wasn’t until Anthony.... (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/9897504/Edith-Tudor-Hart-the-Soviet-spy-with-a-conscience.html) undefined

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