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Mark Richards explores the photography of Kurt Hutton

Men drinking in The Prospect of Whitby, 1942

1934 was a defining year for British photography. Hitler’s restrictions on press freedom led to an exodus of photographers from Germany and Austria, who moved to London. These included emerging talents such as Edith Tudor-Hart, Bill Brandt and Wolf Suschitzky, as well as established photographers such as Kurt Hübschmann (1893–1960) who was born in Strasbourg and emigrated to England in 1934. On arrival, he changed his name to Kurt Hutton and is remembered by this name  as a legendary photojournalist whose work influenced the younger photographers who established themselves in the thirties, such as Bert Hardy.

In Germany, Kurt already had a well-established career as a photographer. At first, his parents decided he should be a solicitor and he was sent to study Law at Oxford in 1911, but he soon found that this dry subject did not appeal to his creative spirit. In 1914, the outbreak of the First World War put all thoughts of a legal career on hold and he volunteered as an officer in the German cavalry. During this time, he learned some basic techniques of photography and his talent became evident immediately. After the war, he practised as an amateur photographer until he decided to make a career of it, after taking lessons in portrait photography in 1923.

Kurt pursued an humane approach to taking pictures,  always seeking to preserve the dignity of his subjects. This is the common quality in all his photography – complemented by an irreverent sense of humour. In 1923, Kurt used his newly-acquired skills to establish a photo studio in Berlin with his wife, which they ran together until 1929 when he began to produce work for Simon Guttmann’s Deutsche Photodienst agency. This led to him being talent-spotted by Stefan Lorant, Editor-in-Chief at the Münchner Illustrierte Presse (Munich Illustrated Press), who commissioned work. This association with Lorant proved to be a seminal point in Kurt’s photographic career.

Stefan Lorant was the major editor in Germany at that time. A Hungarian with one Jewish parent, Lorant was a larger-than-life character, strongly opinionated and with a vision that would shape photojournalism for a generation to come.  As editor of one of the two leading illustrated magazines in Germany, Lorant had come to know Hitler in the late twenties when Hitler was editing a Nazi magazine in Munich. Lorant even briefly dated Geli Raubul who was Hitler’s half-niece, but his commitment to the freedom of the press and refusal to bow to Nazi influence led to his arrest on 14th March 1933.

The end of press freedom in Germany led to a golden age of photojournalism in England. Lorant was released in 1934, arriving in England in April with only a smattering of English and a plan to reinvent British photojournalism. He established major publications such as Weekly Illustrated, Lilliput and Picture Post, all of which would feature Kurt’s photography.

Kurt’s Jewish origins put him and his wife at great risk in Germany and, after travelling to London to photograph Wimbledon in 1934, he made the decision to follow Stefan Lorant and move to England. He was accompanied by another Munich photographer, Hans Baumann who, on arrival. changed his name to Felix Man and joined Kurt as one of Lorant’s photographers.

Kurt photographed all tiers of English society including the residents of the East End. He had a natural talent for portraiture and his photographs of Churchill, Hemingway, Hitchcock and Ingrid Bergman are instantly recognisable. Characteristically, he employed a natural style to capture the spirit of his subjects. His output was prolific and, at times, made up nearly half of the photographs in some editions of Picture Post. Notable series included his photographs of George Orwell’s Wigan in 1939 which provide a unique visual record of  life in that town just before the war.

An acknowledgement of the quality of Kurt’s photography is that his work was used as the standard against which other photographers were measured when learning their trade. Grace Robertson, an immensely talented photo-journalist in the fifties, recalled her work being thrown on the ground by her teacher who shouted “Kurt Hutton would never have taken pictures like these!”

The essence of Lorant’s vision for Picture Post was reflected Kurt Hutton’s approach to photography. It can be summed up in an editorial response to criticism over the inclusion of too many ‘ordinary people’ in the images appearing in the magazine.  The response, which was probably written by Stefan Lorant read, “Picture Post firmly believes in the ordinary man and woman, thinks they have had no fair share in picture journalism, believes their faces are more striking, their lives and doings more full of interest than those of the people whose faces and activities cram the ordinary picture papers”

This statement explains why so many series of photographs about everyday life were included in Weekly Illustrated, Lilliput and Picture Post during the thirties and forties, when other publications focussed on celebrities, politicians and royalty.

For a time, Picture Post with Kurt Hutton and Felix Man as its leading photographers could do no wrong, but Stefan Lorant had not taken into account the impact of the impending war on his German refugee staff. In advance of the invasion of Poland, there was a fear that Britain would do a deal with Hitler and this would involve ‘insurgents’ such as Lorant and Hutton being sent back to Germany to certain death. Although this never came to pass, some emigrated to America, including Stefan Lorant who sailed for New York on board the Brittanic in July 1940, after having his freedom in Britain severely restricted.

Between September 1939 and April 1940, panic set in amongst some of the refugee photographers who were opposed to Hitler or had been forced to flee Germany due to their race, religion or political beliefs.  A suspicion of all things German took hold of the public and, under special measures, ‘enemy aliens’ were interned. Amongst these were Kurt Hutton and Felix Man, whose cameras were confiscated when they were sent to the Isle of Man in 1939. It robbed Picture Post of its most experienced photographers. After it lost its editor and when all of its refugee photographers and journalists were interned, the magazine was down to only five members of staff.

Kurt Hutton remained in custody on the Isle of Man until 1941. His absence, along with the absence of the other leading lights in photojournalism at the time, offered a golden opportunity for new British photographers such as Bert Hardy, who stepped up to fill the gap, becoming the new lead photographer for Picture Post. Yet, even while interned on the Isle of Man, Kurt managed to get his hands on a camera and photographed holidaymakers there. He possessed an energy that was not be easily suppressed and, on his release in late 1941, he made his way back to London to start again.

The strength of Kurt’s work is immediately apparent when examining his archive. The wild abandon seen in one of his most well-known photographs of young women on a rollercoaster in 1938,  as well as the risqué nature of the shot, typifies the unforced nature of his work. Unlike Bill Brandt, Kurt was drawn to employing what were known at the time as ‘miniature’ cameras – those using the relatively new 35mm format such as the Leica III. These were highly portable, versatile cameras and allowed for contact prints, which assisted editorial decisions. However, the cameras were mocked by ‘serious’ photographers who thought they were no better than toys, although the quality of Hutton’s work, and that of others who adopted the Leica,  proves them wrong.

Kurt’s photography is not ‘street photography’ like that of Wolf Suschitzky or Henri Cartier-Bresson, yet neither is it in the poetic style of Bill Brandt and it is unlikely that Kurt considered his photographs to be Art. As social documentary, his work is a powerful record of everyday life during a period of profound social disruption. His photographs were produced in the knowledge that they would be coupled with text, but their quality was such they required no further explanation.

Kurt Hutton retired to Aldeburgh and produced a final photo series on Benjamin Britten who became a friend. It is a revealing series into the private life of this composer and a fitting finale to an extraordinary career of a pioneering photographer who is now mostly forgotten.

‘A large family’ London, 1945

Street artist David Burton working in Swiss Cottage, February 1945

Commissionaire talking to his dachshund in Piccadilly, 1938

Roasted chestnut seller in Piccadilly Circus, 1938

Young women on a rollercoaster, Southend Fair, 1938

Unemployed man with dog from The Wigan of George Orwell, 1939

Life in a back alley, from The Wigan of George Orwell, 1939

Father with children, from The Wigan of George Orwell, 1939

Holidaymakers relaxing on a bench in Douglas, Isle of Man, 1939

Winston Churchill, 1939

Ingrid Bergman and Alfred Hitchcock, 1948

Entrance to Old Buildings and Old Square, leading into Lincoln’s Inn Fields, 1951

Brokers at the London Stock Exchange in Throgmorton Street, November 1951

Benjamin Britten in his studio at The Red House, Aldeburgh 1958

Audience at a Britten performance, Aldeburgh Festival 1949

Picture Post photographers Kurt Hutton (left) and Bert Hardy in 1950

Photographs copyright © Estate of Kurt Hutton

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After he photographed the end of the trams in 1952 at the age of twelve, photographer Colin O’Brien became fascinated by recording the ‘last days’ of vanishing aspects of London life.

Thames Embankment, 1952 “When I was twelve, the trams stopped running forever so I took this picture with my box camera while the driver posed for me. I loved going out with my dad on Sunday mornings for a ride through the Kingsway Tunnel and out on to the Embankment. It was even more exciting if we managed to get the front seat on the top deck where I could imagine I was driving the tram.”

Skinner St, Clerkenwell, 1952 “Long since demolished, the Rio Cinema was where we used to go as kids and watch films over and over again until we got bored. Westerns were my favourite and we all loved to mimic the actors and shout and clap at inappropriate moments”

Clerkenwell Rd, 1970s “After more than a century of use by hundreds of families, Victoria Dwellings – once my home – was demolished and I moved with my family to a flat on the twenty-third floor of the newly built Michael Cliffe House on the other side of Clerkenwell”

Covent Garden, 1973 “The fruit and vegetable market moved to the New Covent Garden Market between Vauxhall and Battersea in 1974”

Hackney, early 1980s “One of the last rag and bone men plying his trade by going door-to-door, picking up metal and scrap”

Regent’s Canal, Bethnal Green, 1987 “George Trewby’s magnificent gasometer constructed for the Gas Light and Coke Company in 1889 towers over the frozen canal”

Nightingale Estate, Hackney Downs, 1999 “Hackney Council decided that many of their high-rise blocks were failures as housing and decided to blow them up. Of the six towers that made up the estate, five were demolished. Since 2003, low-rise buildings have been constructed where the blocks once stood.”

Long Acre, Covent Garden, 1986 “The building was being demolished by a crane swinging an iron ball while two men stood on top of the ruin and finished the job with sledgehammers. There must be an easier way to earn a living”

The Griffin, Shoreditch, 30th June 2007 “Three smokers enjoy their last cigarettes on the final day of legal smoking in public places”

Highbury Corner, 7th May 2006 “Three men sit comatose after the last football match at Highbury Stadium before Arsenal moved to the new Emirates Stadium in Holloway Rd”

Chatsworth Rd, Hackney, 2010 “Suleyman bought this shoe repair shop in 1967, when it was like a time-capsule full of old leather sewing machines and calendars from the 1950s. Even pairs of shoes that were repaired more than ten years ago but never claimed by their owners were still lying around. He got up at 4am every morning and opened the shop between 7am and 4pm, until it closed in 2010.”

Mare St, Hackney, 2009 “I always had a soft spot for Woolworths. The first shop opened on the 6th November 1909 and I took this photograph on 6th January 2009, the last day of trading”

Chatsworth Rd, Hackney, 2008 “A friend took me for a meal one Saturday morning at Jim’s Cafe and it was the best breakfast I had eaten in a long time. I asked Dave, the proprietor, if I could take some pictures and I did shots of him standing in the doorway. When I returned about a month later with the prints, Dave’s wife told me he had died and the cafe closed soon after.”

Chatsworth Rd, Hackney, 2010 “Steve sits on his stock of tyres in the shop that he and his family ran for more than fifty years. It smelled of rubber and the Michelin man in the window was covered in dust. The shop closed on 2nd October 2010, shortly after I took this photograph.”

Clapton Pond, Hackney, 2005 “A group pose proudly to have their picture taken on the last day of the Routemaster buses running on the 38 route, from Clapton Pond to Victoria Station”

Clerkenwell Fire Station, Rosebery Avenue, 2014 “When Clerkenwell Fire Station closed in January 2014 after 142 years, I photographed the fire-fighters on their last day of service at Britain’s oldest operating fire station.”

Photographs copyright © Estate of Colin O’Brien

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Mark Richards explores the controversial work of photographer Edith Tudor-Hart and her secret life as a Soviet agent in London during the Cold War

Child staring into a bakery window, Whitechapel, 1935 (Courtesy of National Gallery of Scotland)

On a wall in a flat in Maida Vale hangs this small photograph. It is a window into a world of social unrest, poverty, espionage and insurrection.  The photograph and the story behind it add weight to the view that there is often little truth in photography. What we see is what the photographer wants us to see.

I saw the photograph when I visited the late photographer Wolfgang Suschitzky for an interview and portrait session in 2016.  It was not taken by him, but by his sister Edith Tudor-Hart (1908–1973). The picture had pride of place on a wall of well-known photographs just inside the entrance.  Edith Tudor-Hart was one of the most talented documentary photographers of her time, but has now faded into obscurity after being being blacklisted for her Communist activity.

For me, it is one of the strongest photographs of its era. One of those pictures that all photographers hope to be able to capture one day. Its ability to tug the heartstrings and generate strong emotion remains even ninety years after it was taken. On face value, it is a photograph of a poor child staring into a bakery window in Whitechapel in 1935.  The disparity between the hungry child and the plentiful display has an enduring poignancy, inspiring a futile desire to intervene.

This photograph was first published next to another of a baby chimp in a zoo, which was much better fed than this girl. The message was clear, as was Edith’s ability to use her camera as a weapon for social justice. The picture was subsequently reproduced widely in Communist leaflets, representing a call to action. Yet to grasp the nature of this phenomenon and understand the other photographs that Edith took of the East End, we need to appreciate both the social context and her personal motives. None of the photographs that she took at that time can be taken at face value.

There is no doubt that this photograph was staged – the bundle clutched tightly in the girl’s left hand is evidence of that. We shall never know who the girl was or how she became to the subject. Edith destroyed her photographic records in 1951 for fear of prosecution, so the background to most of her work is now lost. She used photography to highlight social inequality and deprivation, realising early on – while studying at the Bauhaus – that photographs have the power to alter people’s beliefs and change the world. In her time, photography had become a medium for social change, ideal for the promotion of political views to a large audience, affecting them through the impact of the visual image more powerfully than by the written word.

Edith was acutely aware of the potential to use photography to break down social barriers and influence an audience like never before. For her, photography represented a move of the locus of control into the hands of the people, offering the possibility of self-representation for everyone. She understood that those who press the camera shutter can control the story that a picture tells.

As well as being an accomplished photographer, Edith was also a committed Communist and a Soviet agent who used her power to further her hidden agenda.  Born in Vienna in 1908, she had grown up during a period of unprecedented political and social upheaval which shaped her beliefs. Her radical views are probably best summed up in Das Eland Wiens by the Marxist writer Bruno Frei, which attacks the inequality of capitalism and demands a commitment to revolutionary activism and change. Unusually, the book contained photographs and this was probably a decisive influence in Edith’s choice to become a photographer.

Edith’s father ran a Socialist bookshop which stocked Bruno Frei’s work and she mixed in radical Jewish circles in Vienna. In 1927, she trained as a Montessori teacher in England until she was deported to Austria in 1931 after being photographed at a Communist rally. Once in Austria again, she worked as a photojournalist for the Soviet news agency TASS, but in 1933 she was arrested there, again for being a Communist activist. At this point, Edith fled from Austria with her husband and was exiled in England.

Back in England, she continued her affiliation with the Communist party, both as an activist and a Soviet agent. It is likely that she had been recruited by the NKVD (the predecessor to the KGB) as early as 1927. Edith is often portrayed as a low-level agent yet she spotted and recruited Kim Philby. He was one of the Cambridge spy ring with Anthony Blunt, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, who caused damage to British interests and threatened its intelligence relationship with America during the Cold War. Edith knew Kim Philby’s wife Litzi Friedmann and was the one who introduced Philby to Arnold Deutsch, the Soviet Agent who managed the Cambridge spy ring. Her recruitment of Kim Philby was a seminal moment in her espionage activities.

In 1964, Anthony Blunt described Edith in his confession as being ‘the grandmother of us all.’ Yet, although she continued to be monitored by the security services until her death in 1973, she was never prosecuted for spying due to lack of evidence.

She had planned to produce a book of her photographs called Rich Man, Poor Man, after the nursery rhyme:

Daisy, daisy, who shall it be?

Who shall it be who will marry me?

Rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief,

Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief,

Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor…

The ambition of the book was to highlight the contrast between rich and poor in British society and it would have featured her photographs of the East End, together with a series she took of mining communities in Wales.  The shocking juxtaposition of her ‘Poodle Parlour’ photograph with the picture of the Clerkenwell slums at Gee Street in Lilliput in 1939 demonstrated he power of her approach. However, the book was never published. Eventually, the difficulty of being a woman photographer as well as being blacklisted for her Soviet connections led Edith to abandon photography altogether at the end of the fifties.

Some of the images that were intended for this book are incredibly powerful and reveal the nature of her talent as a photographer. Her method included talking to her subjects instead of photographing them from a distance and she showed a real ability for putting people at their ease.

Bakery Window was to have been the cover photograph of Rich Man, Poor Man and what a book it might have been. Today it lies unconstructed among the negatives of her photographic archives held by the National Gallery of Scotland which were given to them by her brother Wolfgang in 2004.

Slums at Gee St, Clerkenwell 1936

Poodle Parlour, West End, 1935

Family Group, Stepney, 1932

No Home, No Dole, London 1931

Communist Party demonstration, Hyde Park, c.1934

In Total Darkness, London 1935

Caledonian Market, 1931

Self portrait with unknown man, Caledonian Market c.1935

Edith Tudor-Hart, self portrait 1936

Photographs courtesy National Gallery of Scotland

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