‘Tracking’ Edith Tudor-Hart

In 2013, I curated an exhibition and edited a catalogue about the Austrian exile photographer, Edith Tudor-Hart, née Suschitzky (Fig. 1).¹ Born in Vienna in 1908, her radicalism emerged from a nexus of collapsed experience: the cultural activism of her social-democratic parents and their book-shop in Favoriten, the city’s largest working-class district; the destruction of the First World War and promise of the Russian Revolution; her training as a Montessori teacher during the mid 1920s in Vienna and London; and a (brief) period at the end of the decade studying photography at the Bauhaus in Dessau. In Vienna, Tudor-Hart became a Communist activist and low-level Comintern courier, continuing her political work for the Soviets after fleeing to London in 1934, where, famously, she was involved in the recruitment of Kim Philby. My interest had been roused by the complexity of her photography and a suspicion that its previous presentation in Britain during the 1980s had been inflected with nostalgia and a misunderstanding – perhaps even deliberate evasion – of its political formation.² The exhibition, staged in Edinburgh and Vienna, was in a sense a post-Cold War version of Tudor-Hart, an effort to account for the impact of exile and (for a while at least) radical politics on the transitions in her photography. It proved to be a challenging project, evoking a complex and contested historical process and impressed in the two venues by very different crystallizations of historical memory.³

Since 2013 information about Tudor-Hart has continued to emerge, not least in relation to her activity during the 1930s and 1940s supporting the NKVD (later KGB) rezidentura (base) in London. This new information comprises a fictionalized biography written by a distant relative; a film; further exhibition installations; seemingly endless walk-on parts in spy and secret-service histories; and a substantial batch of postwar MI5 files, released in 2015 by the National Archives.⁴ I’m not sure whether these various versions of Tudor-Hart – at times, it must be said, bizarre in form and content – add much to our understanding of her, but they certainly all express a longing to track her down in some way or another. Although played out in very different worlds – the subfusc, paranoid orbit of the postwar secret services and the broadcast melée of contemporary infotainment – the desire to pursue her secret life seems oddly congruent. In my own work, this inclination (far too familiar to be enticing) was something I sought constantly to repress. I will admit to being wildly unsuccessful: in

Fig. 1.

Edith Tudor-Hart, Self-portrait, London, c. 1936. Digital inkjet print.

© Suschitzky/Donat family

Britain at least, the ‘spy with a camera’ narrative took hold and few reviewers bothered to engage with the questions of exile, politics and photography posed by the exhibition and book. That the ‘woman spy with a camera’ narrative proved even more enticing gives us an indication of the pleasures at work.

In what follows, I juxtapose quotations from the newly released MI5 files with a commentary on Tudor-Hart’s more recent reception. If the files offer us little substantively new in terms of content, their form might at least ignite our capacity to think differently about her history. Tudor-Hart has taught me many things, not the least of which is that we need to think carefully when writing historically about radical women. And this includes radical women photographers.

Tudor-Hart’s most recently released MI5 files cover the period from late 1951 to 1965 – from the initial interrogation of the MI6 operative, Kim Philby, to the aftermath of his defection in 1963 and the confession of Anthony Blunt in 1964. It was a fraught period for the security services as the Americans exerted pressure to expose the full extent of Soviet penetration of British government.⁵ Obsessed by the communist ‘enemy within’, a culture of secrecy flourished that bore little relation to the scale of the threat from the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB), which by 1950 had been...