Humphrey Spender; Photojournalist (Wonderful)
Hyfler/Rosner
14 March 2005
Photos in the National Portrait Gallery:
http://photography.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/person.asp%3FlinkID=mp07593
Other photos:
http://www.mercurygallery.plus.com/spender/spender.html
http://www.yale.edu/ycba/exhibitions/past/spender/humphreyspender.htm
Other art:
http://www.redfern-gallery.com/pages/single/6703.html
Humphrey Spender will be remembered as one of the leading
photojournalists of the 1930s, but he was also an
award-winning textile designer and a prolific and
idiosyncratic painter.
Whereas his brother Stephen became a prominent public
personality, Humphrey was a retiring figure who had learned
the art of self-effacement while working for
Mass-Observation. Recruited by Tom Harrisson in 1937 to join
that famous "independent, scientific, fact-finding" project,
he began haunting northern English towns, taking
surreptitious photographs with a Leica carefully concealed
within his voluminous mackintosh. One of his principal aims
was to remain invisible and he often declared a photograph
spoiled when any of his subjects had become aware of his
presence and looked directly at him. The photographs he took
for Left Review, Picture Post and, as "Lensman", the Daily
Mirror made him one of the outstanding chroniclers of
British life between the wars.
The youngest of the four children (three boys and a girl) of
Harold Spender, a Liberal journalist and sometime
politician, Humphrey Spender was born in Hampstead, north
London, on 19 April 1910 - Primrose Day, as he liked
pointing out. He was given his first camera at the age of
nine, and was taught how to use it by his eldest brother,
Michael, a scientist who made a career in photo-
interpretation. A year later, Humphrey was used by the
artist R.H. Sauter as the model for Jon (the son of Young
Jolyon Forsyte) in the numerous illustrations for John
Galsworthy's Awakening (1920). Galsworthy was a friend of,
and possibly in love with, Spender's mother and the young
boy spent several days at Galsworthy's house in Hampstead
happily posing for the illustrator.
He was educated at Gresham's School, Holt, after which he
spent a year in Freiberg studying art history. He enrolled
at the Architectural Association, but although he qualified
as an architect he never practised. Instead he set up a
portrait and commercial photographic studio in the Strand
with his fellow student and lover Bill Edmiston.
In 1934 he was invited by a probation officer to photograph
the East End of London in order to provide evidence of
housing conditions among the poor which were thought to
contribute to crime in the area. He was then commissioned by
Left Review to take pictures of the Jarrow hunger marchers
and the British Union of Fascists' rally at the Albert Hall.
He became the Daily Mirror's "Lensman" in 1935, travelling
around the country in "an open two-seater Alvis 12/50 with
dickey wire wheels and constantly failing brakes" taking
photographs to brighten the newspaper's pages.
A rather more realistic record of life in the 1930s came
with Mass-Observation. He was sent to photograph people in
the emblematic "Worktown" (in fact Bolton) and in Blackpool,
contributing to Charles Madge and Tom Harrisson's ambitious
anthropological field study of working-class England.
He later became one of the best-known photographers for
Picture Post, contributing to a series on British towns
written by poets such as Michael Roberts and Geoffrey
Grigson. He wanted to take unposed photographs of ordinary
people going about their ordinary lives in streets, markets,
pubs, at funerals and sporting events, and to achieve this
he frequently had to resort to disguises and tricks. He
hoped that his work would help to make the world a better
place, and the steadiness of his photographic gaze got him
into trouble with the Mayor of Newcastle, who thought too
much emphasis was being placed on the city's poorer
districts.
At the same time, his photographs are suffused with his
natural warmth, wit and humanity. A volume of those he took
for Mass-Observation was published in 1982 as Worktown
People, and in 2004 he was enrolled as an Honorary Fellow of
the Royal Photographic Society.
Spender spent much of the 1930s travelling in Europe,
witnessing the political upheavals of the period, often in
the company of Stephen Spender and Christopher Isherwood,
whom he notably photographed in Berlin and on Rügen Island,
as well as in Portugal and Amsterdam. He designed the
dust-jacket of Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin (1939), and his
iconic photograph of Isherwood standing at a window was
reproduced on the jacket of Christopher and His Kind (1973).
One of his more hair-raising assignments was in June 1935,
when he was sent by the Mirror to Morocco in a two-seater
Puss Moth aeroplane piloted by a drunk. Spender kept two
diaries (complete and expurgated) during this trip,
describing his adventures in the company of Moroccan guides
and Foreign Legionnaires. These were eventually published
side by side, along with the photographs he had taken, in a
magnificent limited-edition book, Morocco (2004), designed
by the typographer David Jury, who also produced In Darkest
England (1998), a Mass-Observation miscellany which included
a long interview with Spender and several of his
photographs.
Interested in all aspects of Weimar culture, Spender was
nearly arrested at the notorious 1937 "Entartete Kunst"
exhibition in Munich when he was overheard praising the
so-called "Degenerate Art" on display. A fluent
German-speaker, he was also called upon to help out when -
in a case of mistaken identity - his brother Stephen was
arrested for murder. In Austria during the Anschluss, he
took a striking photograph for Tom Hopkinson's Weekly
Illustrated of a crowd unenthusiastically saluting the
invading Germans. The photograph could not be published at
the time, however, because it was feared the people in it
might be identified and shot.
He remained with Picture Post during the Second World War,
taking some of the most enduring and evocative photographs
of life in the services among RAF pilots and seamen on
destroyers and minesweepers. In 1941 he was called up, and
served as an official photographer for the War Office. He
worked in photo-interpretation and he was proud that on one
occasion his skills had prevented the RAF from bombing a
prisoner-of-war camp which it had incorrectly identified as
an ammunition dump.
After the war he continued to work for Picture Post and
while on an assignment in Warminster in 1952 he and Geoffrey
Grigson were arrested (twice) on suspicion that they were
the "missing diplomats" Donald Maclean and Guy Burgess.
Often short of money, he frequently - and to his subsequent
regret - sold negatives and original prints. He began to
concentrate more on his painting, and examples of his work
were acquired by the Tate Gallery and other major
collections.
While awaiting de-mob, Spender noticed an advertisement for
a textile-design competition judged by Henry Moore and,
"having nothing better to do", submitted an entry. The
resulting publicity when he won attracted the attention of
Robin Darwin, Rector of the Royal College of Art, who
invited him to join the textile department, where he spent
20 years as a tutor. Spender won four awards from the
Council for Industrial Design for textiles and wallpapers,
which were manufactured by such companies as Sandersons and
the Edinburgh Weavers.
Among his public works were the mural for the Television
Pavilion at the Festival of Britain, and a huge textile
inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry (and worked by a group of
local needlewomen) to commemorate the millennium of the
Battle of Maldon in 1991. He also designed murals and
mosaics for the P&O liners Canberra and Oriana and
co-designed the National Portrait Gallery's "Young Writers
of the Thirties" exhibition in 1976.
A major retrospective of his photographs was mounted at the
Yale Center for British Art in Connecticut in 1997
(catalogued by Deborah Frizzell as Humphrey Spender's
Humanist Landscapes: photo-documents, 1932-1942), and
exhibitions of his work were held in both London and New
York.
He also held shows of his paintings, drawings and "dotty
objects" (small sculptures made from circuit boards, marbles
and other junk) at his striking modernist house and studio,
designed for him in 1968 by the young Richard Rogers, and
built in the orchard of his previous home, a Victorian
rectory in Ulting, Essex. A passionate gardener who enjoyed
flouting what he disparagingly called "good taste", he made
frequent use of natural forms in his pictures, and was
constantly experimenting with techniques, mixing painting,
drawing, etching and collage. Although very modest, he was
utterly committed to his art and continued to work right up
until his brief final illness.
In 1937 Spender married Margaret (Lolly) Low, whom he had
met at the AA and who had an architectural practice. They
adopted a son, but Lolly shortly developed Hodgkin's disease
and died on Christmas Day 1945, a tragedy commemorated in
what many consider Stephen Spender's finest poem, "Elegy for
Margaret". Humphrey subsequently married Pauline Wynn, an
actress who under her married name became a radio dramatist,
and they had one son.
Spender had told his wives before marrying them that he was
bisexual and he had affairs with both men and women
throughout his life, numbering Frederick Ashton and Paul
Robeson's wife amongst his conquests.
After the death of his second wife, he married Rachel
Hewitt, whom he had met when she was 17 and he was in his
seventies. Herself a talented photographer and artist, she
also became his amanuensis and took charge of his archive,
which was in considerable disarray.
A handsome young man, Spender came in old age to resemble a
compressed version of his famously tall brother Stephen.
They had a similar laugh, and Humphrey particularly
delighted in anecdotes displaying "a nice malice" and what
he called "dotty situations". He had a phenomenally clear
memory, which, combined with an engagingly reckless candour
both about himself and his large circle of acquaintance,
made him hugely entertaining company and an invaluable
interviewee for anyone writing about literature or the arts
in 20th-century Britain.
Peter Parker
John Humphrey Spender, photographer, painter, textile
designer and teacher: born London 19 April 1910; married
1937 Margaret Low (died 1945; one adopted son), 1948 Pauline
Wynn (died 2003; one son), 2003 Rachel Hewitt; died Ulting,
Essex 11 March 2005.
Hyfler/Rosner
>
> In 1937 Spender married Margaret (Lolly) Low, whom he had
> met at the AA and who had an architectural practice. They
> adopted a son, but Lolly shortly developed Hodgkin's
> disease and died on Christmas Day 1945, a tragedy
> commemorated in what many consider Stephen Spender's
> finest poem, "Elegy for Margaret".
Here is the poem:
Elegy for Margaret
Stephen Spender
Poor girl, inhabitant of a strange land
Where death stares through your gaze,
As though a distant moon
Shone through midsummer days
With the skull-like glitter of night:
Poor child, you wear your
summer dress
And your shoes striped with gold
As the earth wears a variegated cover
Of grass and flowers
Covering caverns of destruction over
Where hollow deaths are told.
I look into your sunk eyes,
Shafts of wells to both our hearts,
Which cannot take part in the lies
Of acting these gay parts.
Under our lips, our minds
Become one with the weeping
Of the mortality
Which through sleep is unsleeping.
Of what use is my weeping?
It does not carry a
surgeon's knife
To cut the wrongly
multiplying cells
At the root of your life.
It can only prove
That extremes of love
Stretch beyond the flesh
to hideous bone
Howling in hyena dark alone.
Oh, but my grief is thought,
a dream,
Tomorrow's gale will
sweep away.
It does not wake every day
To the facts which are and
do not only seem:
The granite facts around
your bed,
Poverty-stricken hopeless
ugliness
Of the fact that you will soon
be dead.
Bill Schenley
> Here is the poem:
WOW ... Great obit ... and ... strange, but provocative poem ...
Bill Schenley
>
http://photography.about.com/gi/dynamic/offsite.htm?site=http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/person.asp%3FlinkID=mp07593
The link takes you a photograph of Spender by Steve Pyke. You have to
click on "Artist of 14 portraits" to view Spender's work.
His portrait of Nikolai Polakovs should be an alt.obituaries favorite
...