Essays from the catalogue for the ‘From Streets to Playgrounds: Representing Children in Early 20th Century Toronto’ exhibition, 2016
Threshold photographs, verges, entry points
‘Dressing down’: imaging poverty
A filmed conversation with Wolf Suschitzky
Wolf Suschitzky on photographing children
Threshold photographs, verges, entry points
The agency of photographs
An urgent appeal emanates from archival photographs, argued the late novelist W.G. Sebald. [1] In his view, photographs can have autonomy and agency, are self-contained, and retain a ‘real nucleus’, through which they are able to inspire investigative processes and hypothetical thinking. Sebald showed how, through the eyes of contemporary viewers, stories hidden within photographs, could be illuminated anew. He describes this process as one were the viewer needs to look very closely into an image: as with looking through a stereoscopic view-master, the body of the viewer remains in the present, whereas the eyes are pulled right into the world of the photograph, demanding attention.
‘Almost each photograph still contains some kind of amber’, states author Wilhelm Genazino, ‘and pictures never cease to speak to us, if we look at them long enough’. [2] Like Sebald, Genazino argues that single archival photographs make it possible to help slowly decipher and recover fragments from the past, to dissect moments retrospectively. Still emitting the original referents, an archival photograph stretches out time, and makes it possible to look endlessly at a particular historic moment, and to explore all the details contained within it: those places, people, objects and contexts photographed. Genazino likens this moment of slowly looking at a photograph, and the intensive engagement that is required of the viewer, linked by ‘an umbilical cord’ to the subjects contained within a photograph to a ‘metaphorical skin’ that stretches across both.
In his seminal Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes discussed the particular pull of individual photographs and showed how sometimes the viewer is deeply moved, or touched by a photograph, has a bodily, almost visceral response of recognition (punctum); and how other photographs may trigger a more cerebral, detached response (studium). The argument that images can exert their own power over viewers has also been made forcefully by W.J.T. Mitchell, in What do pictures want. (Mitchell, 2004)
Many archival photographs clearly work on both a punctum and a studium level, and share in common that they require active viewer engagement. The polyvalent and polysemic nature of photographs makes the process of interpretation both exciting and close to infinite, but, to stay with Sebald’s idea of a photograph’s ‘nucleus’, some photographs retain a strong internal appeal.
New registry office site, May 15th, 1912 North West Corner Elizabeth and Louisa St
One such photograph, which I will refer to as a threshold picture for a variety of reasons that will become clear below, is a reasonably well known 1912 street scene taken in Toronto’s central Ward district, or The Ward (or St John’s Ward), by professional photographer Arthur Goss, who worked for various municipal departments, including planning and public health. The Ward was Toronto’s oldest working class neighbourhood and many of its inhabitants were recent migrants.
This photograph, long dislodged from its original referents, has led a nomadic existence and also now exists in multiple versions. Originally captioned ‘New registry office site, May 15th, 1912 North West Corner Elizabeth and Louisa St’, it exists as a digital online image on the City of Toronto Archives website; the original, worn, used and fragile large format glass plate is stored within the City’s archival store. The photograph has been multiplied, cropped, enlarged, copied and used across time and space. It could be argued that this photograph’s nucleus or flickering amber, still reaching into the present,, are the children who are included within it. Most noticeable – as they are positioned centrally – are two young girls; they stand within close proximity to numbers 48-55 Elizabeth Street right on the intersection with Louisa Street and on the threshold between pavement and street. There are two further groups of children standing nearby and the whole photograph is characterized by an enormous depth: the longer one looks at it, the more the photograph, and its central protagonists, give back. The children take up space. They look back at Goss, the photographer, but they also appear to be looking right across time at present day viewers; our eyes meet. The children in the photograph, and the photograph itself as object, communicate across and beyond time and space.
FIG 1 New registry office site, May 15th, 1912 North West Corner Elizabeth and Louisa St Goss, 1912; City of Toronto archives
We can approach this photograph from different angles. A purely descriptive angle would take stock of all the visual referents contained within the photograph’s foreground and background. The aforementioned two young girls in the foreground; the first, aged about four in a dark dress and hair carefully braided, stands in the road. A second, shorter and younger girl in a light dress and with shorter, curly blond hair is on the pavement immediately behind her. They look in opposite directions. There is some horse manure in the street and two rows of pylons. To the girls’ left, and about ten metres away next to a fire hydrant are two boys dressed in dark clothes wearing small caps, they seem closer in age to each other. Arms crossed, one of the boys looks directly at the photographer and holds the gaze of the camera’s lens, the second boy, hands in pockets, looks toward the younger girl in the light dress. Further behind and to the right of the two young girls are three more children on the pavement next to a bicycle shop and ‘Hong Lee’s First Class Laundry’. One of the boys sits on a wooden chair near a door, the other two are holding onto some bicycles. Much further behind this third group of children stands the only visible adult, a suited man.
As a longish exposure time was needed, all that remains of a figure near the man and another near the children by the bicycles is a blurred outline – they would have been moving too quickly to be captured fully. In addition to the seven children, Goss’ photograph also captured a Jewish corner shop with stained glass windows above, and, within its glass pane, a row of houses on the opposite side of the road, barbershop, four large advertising billboards, and a sign offering language classes in the English and Russian language at night school. The large Drink Coca Cola billboard offers to relieve ‘fatigue’, but more prominent is Bob Manchester’s Cracker Jacks burlesque vaudeville poster, announcing a performance by Ruby Leoni and Molly Williams at the Gayety in the week of May 13th. [3]
The agency of the children in the photograph
What changes, or is added to this initial description of the photograph when we consider whether the subjects of photographs, in this case the children on Elizabeth street, also have a lingering agency? Does where they are standing (or sitting), what they are doing, indicate anything significant? Regardless of whether the children face – or look away – from the photographer: are these partial poses, does the slight blur indicate some are, some are not posing? The children clearly all seem comfortable in the urban environment of the intersection – they ‘own’ this area; some assert their power to look back at the photographer. Their different gestures, expressions and postures make them stand out from their collective context, give them a sense of individuality and independence. There are hardly any adults in this scene.
They do not look like ‘stowaways’ in Eelco Runia’s sense; rather, their presence and inclusion in this photograph seems to have been a deliberate act by Goss. [4] Runia first used the concept of a stowaway to refer to historical moments that survive into the present inadvertently, ‘One might say that historical reality travels with historiography not as a paying passenger but as a stowaway… what is absently and unintentionally present on the plane of time. ‘(2006:1).
Elizabeth Edwards mobilized Runia’s ‘stowaway’ and applied it to subjects captured in historical photographs by chance, rather than deliberately.[5]
It is of course no longer possible to establish whether Goss posed the children, and deliberately planned their presence in the photograph or not. But what becomes clearly apparent from looking at the photograph in the present is that the children engaged with Goss, and also had a sense of turf and territory; they understood the streets, were able to navigate them and hold their own when Goss made the photograph. The children travel across and through streets and spaces within the Ward; this photograph has travelled through time, taking these children with it.
What the photograph on its own is unable to communicate to the present day viewer either, is that the children’s neighbourhood is on the verge of irreversible change. It depicts the houses, shops and children on the threshold of their lives, which are about to change irreversibly, as within months of Goss taking the photograph in 1912, all of the modest houses depicted had disappeared as part of a local slum clearance program.
Exhibition entry points and archival discoveries
This photograph actually acted as the initial starting point and spark for the current exhibition at the City of Toronto Archives. Adrienne Chambon and I had first came across this photograph on the City of Toronto archives website in 2009 and became intrigued by it, using it as a starting point to reflect on photographs of children in early 20th century Toronto. The photograph, which was captioned ‘Loitering on Elizabeth Street’ had been used as part of an exhibition at the archives, called Playing by the rules. We were drawn to the children’s strong presence within the photograph, and the girls’ strong stances, with were somehow at odds with the caption, ‘Loitering’. The photograph became our anchor, and, joined by Ernie Lightman, we each started to write a detailed cultural reading of it, exploring the compelling visual evidence of a poor, but well-established migrant community, which was about to disappear.
We had initially believed that the Elizabeth street photograph had been taken by Goss as a single photograph, but during a visit at the City of Toronto Archives, archivist Jessica Ehrenworth explained that the photograph was part of a whole panoramic series comprising of at least seven known photographs that Goss had taken near the intersection of Elizabeth Street and Louisa within days (and a few months) respectively. Suddenly, in addition to one particular historic moment captured by Goss, there were at least six more photographs of street scenes and the Elizabeth Street view quite literally expanded and opened out at the four corners of the photograph as we scanned and scrutinized the additional photographs for any further information and details. Moving across the individual images, a panorama unfolds, taking the viewer further south along Elizabeth Street, and bringing into view many more children standing, and sitting, along the sides, and centres, of the photographs.
‘Stepping across’ the thresholds of the houses in the photographs
Jessica Ehrenworth also shared old plates and maps of Ward 3, and tax assessment rolls for the Ward from the 1880s up to the 1920s with us. These assessment rolls include the names of inhabitants on Elizabeth Street, their age and occupation, whether they were tenants or freeholders, religion, number of occupants, the owner’s name, size of the lot, value of property. Number 49 Elizabeth Street was home to 9-recorded occupants. The two little girls in Goss’ picture might have been the daughters or neighbors of, for example, Samuel Altman, 32, Taylor, Jewish; Solomon Shapira, 47, Painter, Jewish; Morris Krakopsky, 31 Furrier, Jewish or Samuel Kinkel, 35, Newsagent, Jewish.
We were told that, as this entire section of the Ward was going to be demolished to make way for the (new) Registry of Deeds and Land Titles – Goss had been commissioned to photographically document much of it. These are threshold pictures in a double sense: the children frequently stood on the threshold between street and pavement, between door and house, but also the neighbourhood itself on the threshold of disappearing. This of course cannot be apparent from simply looking at the photograph; the photograph is unable to communicate that within months all of Louisa street and half of Elizabeth street will be gone.
‘Aura’ of the original glass plate, near loss and recovery
We had also requested to look at the original glass plate negatives taken by Goss in 1912. Viewing the original glass plate brought home even more so the compositional and technical skills Goss had. The material imperfections of the photographic developer became more visible – as a unique material object, the glass plate had retained an aura. The caption on the glass plate simply said: ‘New Registry Office Site, May 15th, 1912. South West Corner Elizabeth & Louisa Street’. It has been possible to enlarge the original glass plate without losing any significant details. At the same time, the photograph felt much more fragile and precious.
The plate’s survival had indeed been a lot more fragile than we could have anticipated. It had, quite literally, been on the threshold of being lost, but was recovered. We learned that it had lain forgotten in a box in the attic of Toronto’s old City Hall for many decades, as did other plates by Goss. In 1960, Toronto’s first appointed archivist for the City of Toronto’s newly founded central archives, Robert Woadden, rediscovered the plate together with 30,000 other glass negatives depicting the city’s development from 1911 onwards.[6] This dormant archive might have disappeared completely from view, but the glass plates were salvaged and taken on various circuits of production, re-entering into new relations, circumstances and purposes away from their original mission, to diversified audiences. With the advent of official archival record keeping, a transformation of photographs, negatives and other municipal documents into archives could begin. The photographs’ survival bears witness to the former presence, in the streets, of its youngest residents, and to some of the infrastructures and houses.
Appeal of photography
Within a few years, by 1915, Toronto’s first Registry of Deeds and Land Titles office had been built on the site; it stood at the former intersection of Elizabeth street and Louisa Street. [7]
The Ward had embarked on a process of changing from a predominately residential area with small, local shops to reemerging as the new administrative centre of Toronto. The migrant community that had made The Ward their home since the 1880s was pushed further out. Like the occupants and homes of Elizabeth Street, several of the original streets of the Ward disappeared completely. More than half of Elizabeth and Albert streets were lost. Louisa Street was eventually completely absorbed when the New City Hall was built.
FIG 2 Postcard captioned, ‘New City Hall under construction June 22nd, 1964’, Canadian Architectural Archives
No longer in line with the 1960s vision of the city, the Registry office itself was torn down in 1964, just after construction of the New City Hall had been completed. Reflecting back at working with archival photographs, the late writer W.G. Sebald commented that he would frequently try to imagine what happened to the people in the photographs what conjunctures or life trajectories the subjects faced subsequently.
Looking at Goss’ 1912 corner photograph of Louisa Street and Elizabeth Street once more, I, too, wonder, what happened to these children. How and where did their lives continue to unfold? Did they benefit from the new playground, which opened at the top of Elizabeth Street in 1913? Where did they go to school; which Ward neighbourhood did their families move on to? One of the appeals this particular photograph retains into today’s present, is its ability to make the viewer want to know more about its young protagonists; how the children negotiated the streets of their new neighbourhoods, and in turn the trajectories of their own future lives. This photograph continues to provide evidence of their existence, it affirms that they were there; in Roland Barthes’ words, ‘ça a été’, this has been. And yet, the photograph shows a neighbourhood at the threshold of disappearing and therefore, (although this is not yet visible) in danger.
This brings into view contemporary photographs of children across the globe today, in poor urban neighbourhoods. [8] Also photographs of migrant children, refugee children in temporary shelters, children in danger in urban war zones. These photographs, and the children represented within them, emanate an ‘urgent appeal’, and, at the very least, they act as, ‘an invitation to pay attention, to reflect, to learn, to examine” (Sontag, 2003:104). [9]
Part two
New thresholds and possibilities
One hundred years on, the scale of contemporary downtown Toronto is very different to 1912, the two girls in the photographs are long gone, the city’s centre retains no visual clues as to their former existence. The only three buildings to still stand within close vicinity to the original site of the Elizabeth Street photograph are Old City Hall (administration), Osgoode Hall (law) and Trinity Church (religion/moral order). [10] In 2010, I tried to visually reframe and map out the space and former infrastructure of the Ward and made some photographs of the area– as demarcated by Elizabeth Street to the East, Queen Street West to the South, Yonge Street to the East, and Dundas Street West to the North. Quickly grabbed Polaroid photographs were pinned onto the wall with thumbnails and underwent daily scrutiny over several months. I tried to look for any visual residues such as curbs, posts, worn bits of road, and different kinds of shapes in the urban landscape that echoed and resonated with the archival photograph.
Fig 3: collage: Elizabeth street 2010, author’s photograph.
Following this mapping exercise, I also made some more considered photographs, in 2011, this time using a medium format camera. I had located the original site of the Elizabeth street image, which turned out to be a bit further south, in an urban landscape now entirely dominated by concrete.
The original street scene is literally buried underneath the ground floor of New City Hall. Where the photograph was taken in 1912 corresponds with an area that covers the raised garden of City Hall, now filled with grasses, benches and offering a view across to the CN tower, Nathan Philip Square and various hotels. It stretches across to a small new playground on the ground and just to the right of the frame, and a plaque commemorating Toronto’s first Chinese community, which was just beginning to establish itself when Goss took the 1912 Elizabeth street series. [11]
FIG 4 New City Hall – site of 1912 photograph, 2011
The next photograph, taken the same day further north on Elizabeth street, shows an area in a continuous state of flux. Diggers, cranes, construction sites.
Fig. 5 Elizabeth St. North of Dundas Street and New City Hall, 2011
No longer a slum area, but some homeless people at the central bus station and at Nathan Phillip Square. Outside Trinity Church a memorial to named and unnamed homeless people– inside the church a café run by a street charity. Only a few two storey or residential buildings. But a language school offering classes in English and Chinese near Dundas and Elizabeth Street, and a steady flow of people arriving and departing by coach from all over Canada and the States.
The contemporary images reveal a brutality of scale – a modernist architecture that dwarfs humans, and in which children standing, working, or playing in the streets would look out of place and be dangerous. Invisible here, but at the northern section of Elizabeth street is Toronto’s children’s hospital, built on the site of The Ward’s first playground.
Location reference maps
Figure below showing extract of 1910 map of The Ward and the intersection of Louisa/Elizabeth streets. Map extract courtesy of City of Toronto archives.
This figure shows an extract taken from a contemporary map, showing the site of Goss 1912 photograph, New registry office site, May 15th, 1912 North West Corner Elizabeth and Louisa St Goss, 1912, which is now part of Toronto’s City Hall. Map courtesy of City of Toronto archives.
Julia Winckler, September 2016
[1] Sebald articulated these ideas in particular in a radio broadcast on the relationship between writing and photography, ‘Der Schriftsteller und die Fotografie’, [the writer and photography], WDR, Germany, 1999. The program was based on conversations with editor Christian Scholz, W.G. Sebald and Wilhelm Genazino.
[2] see ibid, and also Genazino, W. (2012) book on postcards and found images, Aus der Ferne. Auf der Kippe. Bilder und Texte, Hanser Verlag.
[3] This refers to a show that ran in May 11, featured in Variety.
[4] Runia, E. 2006 ‘Presence’, in History and Theory, Vol. 45, Issue 1, Feb. 2006, Pp.1-29.
[5] Edwards, E. 2015, One Archive, three views, Magnum exhibition catalogue, Bexhill, Delawarr Pavilion.
[6] Brown, William 1998:11.
[7] At the City of Toronto archives, Adrienne Chambon found a photograph taken in 1925 by Arthur Goss inside the Registry. See article X
[8] For an in-depth study, exploring the relationship of working class children and the city, see Colin Ward’s 1978, The Child in the City, Architectural Press, London.
[9] Sontag, S. (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others.
[10] In order to help visualize the changes that occurred within the urban landscape of The Ward, extracts from two maps, a 1910 map showing the location of Goss’ photograph, and a contemporary map, are included at the end of this article. For detailed historical insights into the Ward’s early and later histories, see Robert Harney & Harold Troper’s 1975 comprehensive Immigrants, A portrait of Urban Experience, 1890-1930; Van Nostrand Reinhold Ltd. Toronto; John Lorinc’s meticulous introduction to The Ward, 2015, pp.11-23; Coach House Books; also Sarah Bassnett’s 2016 Picturing Toronto: Photography and the Making of a Modern City, especially her comprehensive section on ‘Liberal Subjects’. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal & Kingston.
[11] For an evocative, forensic and most recent contemporary search for the Ward, see Micallef, S. 2015, ‘Searching for the old Ward’ in The Ward pp.27-29.
Begging, but only a game
‘Dressing down’: imaging poverty
In their book, Images of Childhood in Old Postcards, the late British historian Colin Ward and his cousin, long-time postcard collector Tim Ward, explore how childhood was depicted in picture postcards in the first two decades of the 20th century, when postcards were the most prevalent means of ‘instant communication’. [12] The Wards show that representations of poor children at work and at play were a popular postcard subject, as were staged studio portraits of children from affluent backgrounds, who had been deliberate dressed down. They note that,‘ to modern eyes there is something very strange about the Edwardian picture postcard cult of the ragged, barefoot child, published at a time when the streets were full of real poverty-stricken children who were not nearly so picturesque’ (1991: 172).
Common themes included the school child, fun and games, war and the child, cleanliness, and working children. Staged depictions of children at work frequently focused on the ‘match girl’, the ‘newsie’, the ‘poor little chappie’, ‘boot boy’, ‘flower girl’, and the child beggar. The Wards ponder as to the reasons behind the ‘sentimentalization of the raggedness of the poor’ and state that, ‘… those [children] carefully posed in the studio and sent openly through the post raise questions for the knowing modern viewer.’ (1991:166).
Citing historian Peter Laslett, the Wards explain that at the height of picture postcard circulation, more than forty percent of British children lived in poverty. Whilst poor children were often just part of the scenery in photographs taken in urban street scenes, affluent children were posed inside professional photographic studios dressed up as ragged children, acting poor. This was in stark contrast to visual representations of genuine poor children, who were not usually photographed inside studios. Moreover, the Wards explain that there are hardly any postcards of poor children taken inside their homes, either: ‘the indoor life of the ordinary child is almost outside the range of the picture postcard’ (Ward, C & T. 2001:4). In their chapter, ‘In and out of the studio’, the Wards consider this cultural practice, placing it into a trajectory that belongs to a photographic tradition that originated with Lewis Carrol’s Alice in Wonderland in 1865. Reading the backs of such postcards, they comment that senders often perceived of ragged child depictions as ‘charming’ (1991:166). This approach to poverty appears both paradoxical and highly patronizing.
‘Begging but its only a game’
In his book on found postcards, Aus der Ferne, Auf der Kippe [From afar, hanging in the balance] the writer Wilhelm Genazino speculates on the stories behind their inception, and their lingering pull (2012). The word Kippe has a double sense in German, it can also mean dump/tip – and indeed many found postcards in Genazino’s book were rescued from oblivion in this way.
More than five years ago, when I bought two postcards from the interwar years, I knew very little about child depictions in picture postcards. I had found the cards tucked away in a box at the back of a bookcase in an old shop in Newhaven, near Brighton, England, and bought them as I was immediately drawn to their physical and performative qualities. Neither card had been dated, but both were inscribed on the back as belonging to the ‘collection of Sylvia More Haynes’. Printed onto fibre-based paper, sepia toned, undated, and unsent, both cards looked like a professional photographer had taken them.
The first card depicts a newsboy, or newsy, selling copies of the Daily Sketch paper.
FIG 1 Newsie
Looking at this postcard, it becomes immediately clear that this is a staged studio portrait. The child poses in front of a painted landscape; there is a real clash between the pastoral scene in the background and the child and folded newspapers in the foreground, which feels much more urban. Daily Sketch paper headlines commenting on ‘the King’s progress’, ‘doctors and the milk supply, and ‘why Lord Lloyd resigned’ make it possible to date the photograph’s origins in or around 1929. [13]
Printed on the back of each card, in English, German and French, the words: Communication – Mitteilungen- Correspondence; and Adress to be written here.
Clearly, these postcards were meant to circulate, but what exactly was their message? What did the representations mean to communicate?
The second postcard also has an uncanny quality. It depicts four young boys, all seemingly destitute, and either deaf or dumb, lame or blind. The boy with the lame sign around his neck even seems to have a leg missing. At a time when the slum clearance act was about to be invoked (Greenwood Act, 1930), why would affluent children be dressed up in costumes that had deliberately been made to look torn, too big, worn? When I picked up this card for the first time, I briefly thought the scene might be real, but the boy on the right, apparently blind, gives the game away – he looks at the photographer with a smile. It very quickly became apparent that this, too, was a staged studio portrait. The marble column in the background possibly painted onto the backdrop, the legs of a studio chair visible to the right. Someone, possibly its collector, wrote on the back, ‘Begging but its only a game’.
FIG 2 ‘Begging, but its only a game’
Why play at begging? This postcard raises many questions; in particular, what does this say about perceptions of poverty at the time?
Colin and Tim Ward provide a highly plausible answer: ‘If charities produced pictures of tramps or destitute flower sellers, the postcard producers dressed up children as ragged but jaunty vagabonds or charmy, barefoot waifs. They made poverty, which was an everyday background of Edwardian life, into something that was both cheerful and cheeky’. (2001:5).
As our exhibition, From Street to Playground shows, working class children, who were everywhere in the streets, typically only became incidental subjects in survey photographs or were used to further the aims of philanthropical initiatives.
Julia Winckler, Brighton, September 2016
[12] Ward, Colin and Tim (1991) Images of Childhood in Old Postcards The Bath Press, Avon.
[13] Lord Lloyd, High Commissioner to Egypt, had to resign in 1929.
*Embedded film is temporarily unavailable*
Children are the future of any country: a conversation
Wolf Suschitzky on photographing children
This filmed conversation was recorded at Wolf Suschitzky’s home in Maida Vale, between December 2014 and February 2015. He tells of his pioneering approach to photographing children from the 1930s until recently, of his many publications on the subject and the influence on him of his sister, the brilliant social documentary photographer Edith Tudor Hart. Wolf is a highly regarded documentary photographer, cameraman and humanist, whose career touches upon key historic moments and major photographic developments across the 20th century.
Wolf (born 1912 in Vienna) continues to live in London where he moved in 1935, after escaping Nazi persecution. Like Wolf, Edith became recognized as a photographer with a strong social conscience, and together they made documentary series about working class lives in Britain before, during and after the Second World War. Just before the outbreak of WWII in 1939, Wolf had been commissioned to produce a guide on Photographing Children. In addition to exploring unposed portraits, there was a deeper political message to Wolf’s work and he discussed the value of using documentary photography “in the cause of children”:
‘It can demonstrate the need for more parks and playgrounds by picturing children playing in the streets. By pointed comparison of well-fed and ill-fed children the camera has power to give help to the unfortunates, to fight against child-labour, which is still far more widespread than is generally realized. The camera can show up bad and inadequate school-buildings and help in the campaign for better conditions generally.[14]
In this short documentary, Wolf relates his approach to photographing children at the start of his career. Wolf also discusses his work on Children of the City, a Ministry of information documentary that he worked on with female director Budge Cooper in 1944. This film focuses on ‘child delinquency’ in Dundee, and social deprivation, due, in part, to children having no public spaces to play and learn in.
Children are the future of any country was made by Tony Wallis & Julia Winckler, March 2016
In memory of Tony Wallis, photographer and friend (1938-2016).
Photographs and film footage used in the documentary taken from:
Photographing Children Wolf Suschitzy, 1940, Focal Press
Taking Baby Wolf Suschitzy, 1939 Focal Press
That Baby, Wolf Suschitzky, 1945
The Children’s Zoo, Wolf Suschitzky, 1939
Brendan of Ireland Wolf Suschitzky & Bryan MacMahon 1961, Methuen & Co Ltd
Seven decades of Photography, 2014, SYNEMA, Vienna
Wolf Suschitzky Photos, 2006, SYNEMA, Vienna
Wolf Suschitzky Films, 2010, SYNEMA, Vienna
In the Shadow of Tyranny Edith Tudor Hart, 2013 Hatje Cantz
Further images from Wolf’s private collection.
Children of the city, 1944, Ministry of Information film, Scottish Education department, Paul Rotha productions, film director: Budge Cooper, director of photography: Wolf Suschitzky
Short extract used courtesy of Wolf Suschitzky.
Fig: Boys playing cards, Dundee, 1944, Wolfgang Suschitzky
[14] Suschitzky, W. 1940 Photographing Children. How to do it series, N.26, p.70