Another Eye: Women Refugee Photographers in Britain 1933 – 1969

May 1940: One of the young girls from the Canning Town Women's Settlement, looking at some of the work produced by local children concerning their views of the war, including this drawing by Michael Butterworth. Original Publication: Picture Post - 290 - A Child's View Of The War - pub. 11th May 1940 (Photo by Gerti Deutsch/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

Group Show / Another Eye: Women Refugee Photographers in Britain 1933 – 1969

Reviewed by Ellie Howard

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Four Corners
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Four Corners
Ground Floor, 121 Roman Rd, Bethnal Green, London E2 0QN

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A survey of Jewish émigré photographers, titled Another Eye: women refugee photographers in Britain after 1993, begins with poignancy. Slightly jaundiced and rumpled at the corners, the framed pages of Erika Koch’s album show photographs of relaxed inter-war years, stretching across the Berlin seasons: from a swim-suited pair of youth, eyes closed to the sunlight illuminating their faces, through to winter snow. The snapshots are ghosts of Koch’s pre-emigration life, a casualty of war, but cobbled together as a professional portfolio the numbered photographs speak volumes of her hopefulness. In a wider sense, the portfolio symbolises the itinerant nature of female émigré photographers and their feverish industry once in exile.

The exhibition brings into immediate focus the careers of eighteen photographers, whose works deeply influenced British visual culture; but have been neglected by it [1]. Grouping female photographers can run the risk of essentialism, but the curatorial thread reveals the staggering diversity of approaches, and photographic practices, to which they lent their shared experience. Further, it makes connections between the photographers’ displacement and their versatility as photographers. As Nachum Gidal writes, regarding Jewish practitioners, “there is a discernible quest to explore the unknown, to experiment, to take risks, to accept new ideas, to find and fight for new vistas as well as new visions.” [2] The viewer must tease out their individual paths through examining how each woman carved a niche, or pushed the boundaries of her photographic license. 

A first instance can be found in Edith Tudor-Hart (née Suschitzky). Posthumously infamous for her role in the Cambridge Five, a Soviet spy ring, she is commonly discussed in relation to espionage. A larger failure that haunted her radical, but restricted, career. Raised a socialist, Tudor-Hart was politicised young. Her early work, in a Bauhaus social realist vein, documented working-class impoverishment in the East End and Vienna’s Lobau. In 1933, she fled Austria for the second time, to focus her incisive, political lens upon British social issues. A double-page spread in Lilliput (April, 1939) shows two dialogic portraits: an English bulldog having a blow-dry is captioned ‘Should we have this?’; a second statement, ‘Must we have this?’, is illustrated by a large family fenced in by a grimy London slum. Always self-explanatory, but suasive in its technique, Tudor-Hart’s realist photography regrettably found little footing outside of small-circulation publications. In the 1930s, socialist journalism had not applied photographic aids to its causes, and she struggled to define her work. 

The Picture Post, an émigré refuge, hired Tudor-Hart intermittently. But the magazine’s application for her photographer permit in 1944, alerted MI5 who advised the Ministry of Information of Tudor-Hart’s comintern activities. Her short, but impactful, spell at the magazine was curtailed. A few years earlier, her photographs for Margery Spring Rice’s Working-Class Wives (1939) showed her radical eye becoming less antagonistic and veering towards photographic naturalism, toeing the line of the Popular Front coalition’s message of social amelioration [3]. Increasingly unable to critique social policies, her work became focused on utopian aspects of child education and welfare reform. While Tudor-Hart’s archive is incomplete, due to confiscation or even self-destruction by the photographer during the 1950s spy raids, her remaining work speaks of the personal and political constraints she faced. Not only relating to her status as Special Branch surveilled, Jewish, married, (and later single) mother; but the reform-minded Popular Front coalition.

Tudor-Hart’s work for the Picture Post coincided with Gerti Deutsch’s: a long serving, and prolific, photojournalist. Using the publication as a nexus, the exhibition creates parallels between the émigré women and their commissioned work that often visualises the child as an emblem of hope. Deutsch’s Child’s View of the War (1940) is a cropped portrait of a small boy, face hidden, drawing upon a blank page; his non-specificity allows him to stand-in for all children. In context, it rouses an emotional response on behalf of the collective innocence of childhood destroyed, wrought from the societal shift in thinking around children during the Second World War. A change reflected in the British response to Kindertransport evacuees. The Picture Post veered towards a non-partisan approach, in the interests of patriotism and domestic propaganda [4], but Deutsch’s work addresses wider international concerns hinting at her experience as an émigré, and the skilful manner in which she used reportage. 

Dr Adelheid ‘Heidi’ Heimann could be considered a ‘jobbing’ photographer and writer due to her adaptable career spent mainly between two émigré institutions, the Warburg Institute and the Picture Post. Primarily an academic, her scholarly success tends to eclipse her camerawork. The Warburg valued photographic reproductions as artistic heritage and saw their benefits to educational studies in futurity. Furthermore, recording cultural heritage sites was vital. During World War Two, Heimann was based in the photographic department and assisted in surveying national artworks, an thoughtful project to which the press responded: “appreciation of our artistic heritage by fugitives from cultural barbarism has led to a new achievement in photography” [5]. The destruction of the war wrought havoc upon European heritage, and the Warburg’s records proved vital. While a number of photographers contributed to the photography department, Heimann employed her knowledgeable eye to her image-making as revealed in a later portrait of the Cefalu cathedral. The historiated capitals of the cloister column are documented in a reverential manner. Slightly distorted from Heimann’s on-the-ground perspective and with a shadow looming across its twinned marble face, the photograph visualises the slow poetics of time through the art historian’s lens. Heimann, eventually promoted to assistant curator, helped shape the intellectual stance of the Warburg Institute’s photography department, and the presentation of her erudite photographic studies endorses this. 

Elsbeth Juda’s photographic contributions were also marginalised in photographic history, until recently. A first-rate fashion and advertising photographer, she was taught by fellow émigré Lucia Moholy; the pair using Juda’s kitchen sink for tutorials. After a stretch at the Scaiconi Studio, Juda joined the The Ambassador: The British Exports Magazine as associate editor. Although driven by ‘making a living’, Juda’s commercial work is individualistic. In Barbara Goalen on the Roof of Whitworth & Mitchell’s Manchester showroom (1952) she employs the female form to highlight the sensuality of fabric. Clutching billowing clouds of fabric to her breast, the model’s haughty gaze is comically unaware of the flight of the rest of the roll across the roof. The photograph, unlike others found in 1940s trade magazines, is a radical take. Its hybridity, as a site where economics and aesthetics meet, and high-fashion and manufacture blur, championed British textile export through innovative means. It’s slogan, ‘Export or Die’ can be read as a tongue-in-cheek acknowledgement of the Jewish émigré attitude.

The photography at Another Eye reveals the complex ways that female emigres integrated into and resisted their environments post-relocation. The shifting attitudes towards women’s education in the 1920s Weimar Republic, combined with the history of Jewish involvement in photography, meant the vocation drew liberal Jewish women during crisis [6]. While some re-located their practice, many female émigrés’ entry into the British photography industry was directly precipitated by Nazism [7]. Their acceptance was largely supported by informal networks of working émigrés in Britain, which in gathering shaped British intellectual and visual culture considerably. The sheer scale of work across genres, and occasional work as ‘jobbing’ photographers, indicates as to why their contributions have been obscured within wider photographic history. Yet in drawing their work together in cohesion, the exhibition demonstrates what discoveries can be made through greater sensitivity to gender and ethnic difference. 

– Reviewed for Photomonitor by Ellie Howard

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As this exhibition may be subject to visitor restrictions in the coming weeks because of the current advice, please follow this link to the Four Corners exhibition catalogue to view many of the works online: https://www.fourcornersfilm.co.uk/whats-on/another-eye-women-refugee-photographers-in-britain-after-1933

Above image: ‘May 1940: One of the young girls from the Canning Town Women’s Settlement, looking at some of the work produced by local children concerning their views of the war, including this drawing by Michael Butterworth.’ Original Publication: Picture Post – 290 – A Child’s View Of The War – pub. 11th May 1940 (Photo by Gerti Deutsch/Picture Post/Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

[1] For more information, see John March.  March, J. ‘9 Women Exile Photographers’, In Exile and Gender II: Politics, Education and the Arts, 128-42. Vol. 18. Yearbook of the Research Centre for German and Austrian Exile Studies. 2017.

[2] Nachum T. Gidal, ‘Jews in Photography,’ Year Book of the Leo Baeck Institute, 1987, 447. 

[3] Forbes, D. ‘Politics, Photography and Exile in the Life of Edith Tudor-Hart (1908 1973)’, in Behr, S. and Malet. M. (ed) Arts in Exile in Britain 1933-1945 : Politics and Cultural Identity, 2005. 

[4] Williams, V. The Other Observers : Women Photographers in Britain 1900 to the Present, 1991.

[5] The Institute of British Photographers Record, cited in McEwan, D (2005), ‘Exhibition as Morale Booster: The Exhibition Programme of the Warburg Institute 1938 1945’ in Behr, S. and Malet. M. (ed) Arts in Exile in Britain 1933-1945 : Politics and Cultural Identity, 2005. 

[6] Berkowitz, M. Jews and Photography in Britain. 2015.

[7]. As David Berkowitz (2015) writes, “from the 1850s to the 1950s, if one’s picture was snapped for a price, there was a good chance that the person behind the camera was born a Jew.” The novelty of the medium, and the technical expertise required, meant photography was considered a Jewish field. Yet fuelled by anti-semitic sentiment across Europe, alongside various acculturation practices, means Jewish involvement in photographic history has been marginalised.