In pictures: Edith Tudor-Hart - In the Shadow of Tyranny
28 February 2013
Last updated at 17:29
The life and work of Edith Tudor-Hart, one of the most celebrated photographers in Britain during the 1930s and 1940s, is the subject of a major new exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
The photographic works of Edith Tudor-Hart are the subject of a major new exhibition at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Throughout the 1920s, Vienna was afflicted by high levels of unemployment, a source of social unrest, like this demonstration. Some estimates suggest that, by 1933, this affected as many as 750,000 people, or 40% of the urban labour force.
Tudor-Hart probably took this photograph of the Prater Ferris Wheel, a defining symbol of Vienna, when she was planning a photo essay about the city and is the most modernist of her images.
In the wake of WW1, the Austrian Social Democratic Party had a youthful membership. It is estimated that up to 60% of the Viennese Social Democrats were under 40 years of age.
This was Tudor-Hart’s most popular photograph during the 1930s and was reproduced in a number of propaganda pamphlets. The juxtaposition of the plenitude of the bakery window with the dishevelled and hungry child reinforced the opposition of rich and poor.
Caledonian Market, a former livestock mart, was one of the largest flea-markets in London during the 1930s. It was popular with photographers as it offered easy access to a lively aspect of the city’s working-class culture.
A market stall owner tries to entice customers with his fruit in Vienna in 1932.