Edith Tudor-Hart: from commitment to rehabilitation
Edith Tudor-Hart, was born Suschitzky to a Jewish family of booksellers in Vienna on August 28, 1908 and died on May 12, 1973 in Brighton. She studied photography at the Bauhaus and then became a nursery nurse at the Montessori School in Vienna. But she pursued photography to fight against fascism.
In 1926 she met the British Alex Tudor-Hart, a student of Melanie Klein, who was studying orthopaedic surgery in Vienna and belonged to a left-wing family of artists. He married in 1933 and moved to London. While he fought in the Spanish Civil War with the communists, she made photographic reports on the refugees from the Spanish Civil War and on the region of north-east England in industrial decline.
From the end of the 1930s, it focused on social problems, particularly those of housing policy and disabled children. Close to the Kominterm, she became a spy for the USSR and created with her group damage to the British secret service after the war, until her discovery in the 1960s.
The spy was an exceptional photographer. And the handicap of one of her sons Tommy will darken a life of exile of the one who lives in communism a hope to change society but also to overcome anti-Semitism forever and quite wrongly.
Her grand-nephew, the writer Peter Stephan Jungk, has dedicated an exciting rehabilitation film released in 2017 in Austria, Tracking Edith, which is complemented by a book published by Actes Sud: La chambre obscure d’Edith Tudor-Hart.
He tries to understand what is today a guilty deviation but which, for a whole generation, went hand in hand with the communist ideal – spying for the benefit of Moscow. Nevertheless, the work retains a strength that few photographers have achieved.
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