When he first began his career as a photojournalist in the early 1930s, Humphrey Spender spent his work time capturing images of pastoral England for the Daily Mirror. But it was the lives of the urban working class in Depression-era and wartime Britain that most inspired him photographically. More than 70 of his images of British citizens in that turbulent era will be on display in a new exhibit opening Wednesday, Sept. 10, at the Yale Center for British Art.
"Humphrey Spender's Humanist Landscapes: Photo-documents, 1932-1942" is the first museum exhibit in the United States devoted to the photojournalist's work. On view through Nov. 9, it will also feature copies of the magazines in which Mr. Spender's photo-stories appeared, as well as paintings and drawings by his contemporaries.
Humphrey Spender is credited with merging individual drama with broader social concerns in his photographs, which were instrumental in the early rise of the British documentary movement. Some of his early photographs of unemployment and poverty in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Jarrow and Stepney were published in the periodicals Listener (1934) and Left Review (1936). Following their publication, Mr. Spender's growing commitment to the sociological study of the British people led to his involvement with the Mass-Observation, a project to survey British culture and society. As a photographer for the project 1937-38, he captured significant moments in the flow of life in pubs, parks, markets, factories, offices and locker rooms. His themes in these works parallel those found in the prose and poetry of his older brother Stephen Spender and other writers in the circle of W.H. Auden.
While working on the Mass-Observation project, Mr. Spender became a photojournalist for the new illustrated weekly magazine Picture Post, a magazine that has been credited with helping to establish modern British journalism and shaping the new social consciousness and radicalism of the war years. In photo stories both on conditions in Britain's industrial cities and on servicemen and civilians coping with the war, Mr. Spender continued to deepen and refine his art as a photographer and his understanding as an observer of human relations, according to Deborah Frizzell, an independent curator who helped organize the exhibit and who conducted a series of in-depth interviews with Mr. Spender. Scott Wilcox, acting curator for prints and drawings at the Yale Center for British Art, is a co-curator of the exhibit.
Overcome by aesthetic and ethical concerns about the nature of
photojournalism,
Mr. Spender stopped taking photographs. From 1942 he worked in
photo-interpretation in the British Intelligence Service. After the war,
he devoted himself to painting and textile design. He once described his
views about his first career: "... I believed obsessionally that truth
would be revealed only when people were not aware of being photographed. I
had to be invisible. There was an uncomfortable element of spying in all
this and the press was often hostile. [Photographers] were called spies,
pryers, mass-eavesdroppers, nosey parkers, peeping-toms, lopers, snoopers,
envelope-steamers, keyhole artists, sex maniacs, sissies, [and] society
playboys. ..."
Among Mr. Spender's contemporaries and colleagues whose works are included in the exhibit are Humphrey Jennings, William Coldstream and Graham Bell. Their drawings, prints or paintings help to place Mr. Spender's photography within the broader context of British art and the documentary movement of the 1930s, says Ms. Frizzell.
Several special events are planned in conjunction with the exhibition. The first of these is a conversation with Mr. Spender and Ms. Frizzell on Wednesday, Sept. 10, at 4 p.m. in the lecture hall of the Yale Center for British Art. The event is free and open to the public.
On Saturday, Sept. 13, the center is hosting a symposium titled
"'Spies, pryers, mass-eavesdroppers, nosey parkers, peeping-toms, lopers,
snoopers, envelope-steamers,
keyhole artists': Documentary Photography and the Desire to Tell the
Truth." The symposium, which will be held 10:30 a.m.-4:30 p.m., will
explore the origins of the documentary movement in Britain and America in
the 1930s and its reinvention in the 1990s. Speakers include Ms. Frizzell,
Yale art historian Jonathan Weinberg; Ellen Handy of the International
Center of Photography; Vicki Goldberg, a freelance critic and writer for
American Photographer and The New York Times; and Fred Ritchin, an
associate professor of photography and communications at New York
University. Moderating the symposium will be Mr. Wilcox. The event is free
and open to the public. For further information on the symposium, call
432-2855.
Other events include a film series celebrating the documentary movement of the 1930s and 1940s, dramatic readings of works by Mr. Spender's contemporaries by students at the School of Drama, weekly gallery talks and a weekend children's photography program. Further information on these will appear in upcoming issues of the Yale Bulletin & Calendar.
The Yale Center for British Art, located at 1080 Chapel St., is open Tuesday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Sunday, noon-5 p.m. Admission is free. For more information, call 432-2800 or visit the center's web site at http://www.yale/edu/ycba.