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In:Photography in Children's Literature
Edited by Elina Druker and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 17] 2023
► pp. 210–229

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Chapter 9
Politics, art, and pedagogy in Edith Tudor-Hart’s photographs of children

 | Newcastle University, UK
Published online: 19 September 2023
DOI logo with link
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.17.09rey
Abstract
Edith Tudor-Hart, a photographer working in Britain from the 1930s to the 1950s, became exceptionally good at photographing children. Her final series of images, published in a classroom text called Moving and Growing (1952), were created through a collaborative method she developed by combining her teaching experience and her training as an artist with her political conviction that photography is a democratic medium. The results are dynamic photographs that capture children moving, risking and creating. Shortly after Moving and Growing was published, Tudor-Hart abandoned photography and destroyed her catalogue of negatives fearing she was about to be prosecuted as a spy. As a consequence, her work was largely forgotten, but her images and working methods deserve to be recalled and studied. In our highly visual age, Edith Tudor-Hart’s powerful images have much to say about the relationship between photography and images of childhood.
Article outline
  • Portrait of the artist
  • The wellbeing of all children
  • From politics to pedagogy
  • Working with children
  • Lessons and legacies
  • Notes
  • References
References (33)
References
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Websites featuring work by Edith Tudor-Hart:
https://hundredheroines.org/exposure/edith-tudor-hart-gallery/
https://www.nationalgalleries.org/art-and-artists/artists/edith-tudor-hart
https://onthisdateinphotography.com/2020/05/24/may-24-vital/>
http://www.trackingedith.com/new-page-21
http://www.thedoublenegative.co.uk/2013/03/profile-%E2%80%93-edith-tudor-hart/>
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