Edited by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 17] 2023
► pp. 210–229
Edith Tudor-Hart, a photographer working in Britain from the 1930s to the 1950s, became exceptionally good at photographing children. Her final series of images, published in a classroom text called Moving and Growing (1952), were created through a collaborative method she developed by combining her teaching experience and her training as an artist with her political conviction that photography is a democratic medium. The results are dynamic photographs that capture children moving, risking and creating. Shortly after Moving and Growing was published, Tudor-Hart abandoned photography and destroyed her catalogue of negatives fearing she was about to be prosecuted as a spy. As a consequence, her work was largely forgotten, but her images and working methods deserve to be recalled and studied. In our highly visual age, Edith Tudor-Hart’s powerful images have much to say about the relationship between photography and images of childhood.