Cover not available
Part of
Photography in Children's Literature
Edited by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 17] 2023
► pp. 210–229

Chapter 9
Politics, art, and pedagogy in Edith Tudor-Hart’s photographs of children

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.
Article outline
  • Portrait of the artist
  • The wellbeing of all children
  • From politics to pedagogy
  • Working with children
  • Lessons and legacies
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 19 September 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.17.09rey
References (33)
References
Primary sources
Cloud, Yvonne with Ellis, Richard. 1937. The Basque Children in England. An Account of their Life at North Stoneham Camp. Photographs by Edith Tudor-Hart and P. I. A. Photos. London: Victor Gollancz.Google Scholar
Moving and Growing: Physical Education in the Primary School, Part One. 1952. Photographs by Edith Tudor-Hart. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office.Google Scholar
Secondary sources
Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. Translated from the French by Richard Howard. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. 1935. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Illuminations, Hannah Arendt (ed). Translated from German by Harry Zohn. 1–26. New York: Schocken Books. <[URL]> (31 December 2021).Google Scholar
Boal, Augusto. 2008. Theatre of the Oppressed, 3rd edition. Translated from the Spanish by Charles A. and Maria-Odilia Leal McBride and Emily Fryer. London: Pluto Press [first published 1974].Google Scholar
Burke, David. 2014. The Lawn Road Flats: Spies, Writers and Artists (History of British Intelligence). Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press.Google Scholar
Capshaw, Katharine. 2014. Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. <[URL]> (1 January 2022).Google Scholar
Chawar, Eva, Deszez-Tryhubzak, Justyna, Kowalska, Katarzyna, Maniakowska, Olga, Marecki, Mateusz, Palezyńska; Pszczolowski, Eryk & Sikora, Dorota. 2018. Children’s Voices in the Polish Canon Wars: Participatory Research in Action. International Research in Children’s Literature 11.2: 111–131. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Chen, Amber. 28 October 2021. Exploration of Implementation Practices of Montessori Education in Mainland China. Humanities and Social Sciences Communication 8: 1–10. <[URL]> (26 February 2022). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Department of Photographs. 2004. Photography at the Bauhaus. In Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art. [URL] (October 2004)Google Scholar
Forbes, Duncan, Holzer, Anton & McGrath, Roberta. 2013. Edith Tudor-Hart: In the Shadow of Tyranny. Stuttgart: Hatje Cantz Verlag.Google Scholar
Higonnet, Anne. 1998. Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood. London: Thames and Hudson.Google Scholar
Jungk, Peter Stephan. 2015. Die Dunkelkammern der Edith Tudor-Hart. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer.Google Scholar
. 27 May 2019. Lives of the Artists. Edith Tudor-Hart: My Great-Aunt, the Spy. Tate Etc. <[URL]> (3 January 2022).Google Scholar
, director and writer. 2017. Tracking Edith. 2017. Austria: Peartree Entertainment with Transmitter Film.Google Scholar
Marshall, Chloë. 27 October 2017. Montessori Education: A Review of the Evidence Base. npj Science of Learning 2: 1–9. <[URL]> (25 February 2022). DOI logoGoogle Scholar
McArdle, James. 24 May, 2020. On This Date in Photography: May 24 “Vital”. <[URL]> (7 January 2020).Google Scholar
“Profile – Photographer Edith Tudor-Hart.” Double Negative 05.03.2013. <[URL]> (7 February 2022).Google Scholar
Radford, Robert. 1980. Edith Tudor-Hart. Camerawork Magazine 19.4: 1–4.Google Scholar
Ray, Larry. 2020. Social Theory, Photography and the Visual Aesthetics of Cultural Modernity. Cultural Sociology 14.2: 139–159. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Reynolds, Kimberley. 2016. Left Out: The Forgotten Tradition of Radical Publishing in Britain 1910–1949. Oxford: Oxford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Silverman, Kaja. 2015. The Miracle of Analogy: or the History of Photography, Part One. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Sontag, Susan. 1973. On Photography. New York: Farrar.Google Scholar
Tudor-Hart, Edith. 27 June, 1956. Dancing at School. Amateur Photographer, 612–614.Google Scholar
. June 1945. Photography as a Profession. Housewife, 4–5.Google Scholar
. 27 September 1931. Was will der neue Kindergarten? Der Kuckuck, 9–10.Google Scholar
Twin-lens Reflex Camera. [URL] (9 January 2022).Google Scholar
Wall, Barbara. 1991. The Narrator’s Voice: The Dilemma of Children’s Fiction. London: Macmillan. DOI logoGoogle Scholar
Websites featuring work by Edith Tudor-Hart:
https://hundredheroines.org/exposure/edith-tudor-hart-gallery/
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/artists/edith-tudor-hart
https://onthisdateinphotography.com/2020/05/24/may-24-vital/>
http://www.trackingedith.com/new-page-21
http://www.thedoublenegative.co.uk/2013/03/profile-%E2%80%93-edith-tudor-hart/>