Edith Tudor-Hart, Photographer

Click here to book for The Gentle Author’s Tours 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…