Arthur Strong; Photographer who took rare portraits of C. S. Lewis
Hyfler/Rosner
Photographer who took rare portraits of C. S. Lewis
13 January 2004
Arthur Philpot Strong, photographer: born Banstead,
Surrey 26 April 1908; married 1946 Signe Lund (one
daughter); died Falun, Sweden 6 January 2004.
<independent>
The pioneering portrait and news photographer Arthur Strong,
who freelanced for the Associated Press and Camera Press
agencies, is best known for his exclusive portraits of C.S.
Lewis, the Christian apologist and author of the Narnia
stories. Lewis, who was notoriously camera-shy, gave Strong
unprecedented access to him in his study in Magdalen
College, Oxford, to take the pictures in 1947. Three are at
the National Portrait Gallery in London, and one of him
sitting at his desk was used for the dust-jacket of A.N.
Wilson's best-selling 1990 biography. The gallery retains 12
of Strong's photo portraits.
Other public figures who posed for him included Jawaharlal
Nehru (at the League of Nations in Geneva, 1935), who became
first prime minister of independent India, Eduard Benesch,
the Czechoslovak prime minister and President of the League
of Nations (1936), and Prince Faisal, later King of Saudi
Arabia (at the UN, San Francisco, 1945).
Strong experimented with colour photography in its early
days. He was the sole British press photographer at the
launch of the United Nations in San Francisco in 1945, and
was the only photographer to take colour pictures of the
opening ceremony. They were published around the world and
were still being used 50 years later. One was of the Earl of
Halifax, head of the British delegation, signing the treaty,
and another was of the Soviet Foreign Secretary Vyacheslav
Molotov with Andrei Gromyko, then ambassador in Washington
DC.
Arthur Strong was born in 1908 in Banstead, Surrey. He was
apprenticed in 1930 to the portrait photographer Howard
Coster in Essex Street, off Fleet Street in London, whose
subjects included King George V, Bernard Shaw and Lawrence
of Arabia. The following year, Strong began experimenting in
natural "available light" portraiture, rather than using
studio arc-lights. He pioneered the technique and used it
almost exclusively from then on.
His work attracted the attention of the Associated Press,
who commissioned him to cover Hitler's mass party rally at
Nuremberg in 1937. Strong was arrested and imprisoned by the
Gestapo for trying to photograph the Führer with a telephoto
lens without the necessary permit. AP's representative in
Germany secured his release, but the Gestapo continued to
shadow Strong from then on.
Kodak had used Strong's natural-light pictures of children
for its publicity and, in 1934, the company offered to build
him a studio in London. Kodak wanted him to handle one of
its main clients, Benson Advertising. But that year Strong
had encountered Frank Buchman's Christian movement the
Oxford Group. Buchman put to him: "Why not come and
photograph this revolution?" Strong responded, turning down
Kodak's invitation.
In 1937 he took the front-cover photograph, of a crowd of
young Britons, for the group's mass-circulation magazine
Rising Tide, which had a print run of 1.5 million in eight
languages. The photograph was declared "picture of the year"
by the UK's Institute of Professional Photographers at its
national exhibition. When Buchman launched the group's
programme of "Moral Re-Armament" (MRA) in London in 1938,
and in the United States at the beginning of the Second
World War, Strong travelled with him.
Strong was at the West Coast launch of MRA at the packed
Hollywood Bowl in 1939. Trying to capture the size of the
event, he had the insistent thought to get out and climb the
nearby hillside. There he photographed the four searchlight
beams reaching up into the night sky from the stage,
symbolising the four absolute moral standards advocated by
MRA - honesty, purity, unselfishness and love. Within
seconds there was a power failure. Strong always said
afterwards that had he not obeyed his impulse the moment
would have been lost for ever. The picture was published on
the front cover of the French magazine L'Illustration in
July 1939.
Strong would use this experience to train younger
photographers to be alert to the unexpected inner promptings
which might give an extra dimension to their skills. His
talent lay in capturing the precise moment in an age before
fast-action, wind-on camera motors were invented. His
favourite camera in those days was a German 35mm Contax.
He was not averse to telling the occasional tale against
himself. Once, Buchman commissioned him to take an important
photograph of somebody some 200 miles away. Strong returned
from the assignment only to discover that he had forgotten
to put film in his camera.
Some of America's leading photographers became his friends,
including Edward Steichen, at that time Director of the US
Naval Photographic Institute, and Arnold Genthe whose
pictures of Greta Garbo paved her way to Hollywood. Karsh of
Ottawa told Strong:
I would love to do what you are doing. But I have an
expensive wife. That is why I have to go to Hollywood to
photograph the lovelies.
Strong returned to England in 1945, where he took a series
of graphic picture stories for magazine publication, such as
coal-miners working to ease the post-war fuel shortage. His
aim was always to illustrate the human factor and the
importance of human relationships.
In 1946 he married the Norwegian designer and landscape
painter Signe Lund. In 1951, he was given 40 minutes of
exclusive access to photograph the four-year-old heir to the
Swedish throne and present king, Karl Gustav, scooping
Time-Life, Paris Match and Stern. The following year, in
Helsinki, he took the first ever colour action photographs
of the Bolshoi Ballet, during an open-air performance at the
Olympic Games celebrations, shot from the 4,000-strong
audience on a 35mm Leica at one eighth of a second. The
picture is now in the Bolshoi's museum in Moscow.
He and Signe travelled in the 1950s throughout Africa, where
MRA was extensively at work in helping to ease the
transition to independence of African countries. In Ghana he
took exclusive photos of President Kwame Nkrumah at the
Independence Day celebrations in 1954.
In 1985 they settled in Sweden, from where Strong kept up a
correspondence with young photographers all over the world.
Michael Smith