Coast of Canada to the southwest coast of England where Helen Muspratt talks about her life during the last 50 years, five women photographers.
I mean the experimental time came for me before marriage. After that I really had to earn and I think I was very fortunate.
I've always thought a late marriage is a sensible thing for women. I say late, around about 30. But it just so happened that was how it happened to me.
Then I did go on earning for another 40 years I had to work. It was hard work.
Now I have an envelope. I put it all very nice and neatly ready early on. But of course one loses things. Everything is in this room. I don't know that.
But just if you wanted a short I have found another photograph here of this Constance Ellis who photographed for the 19.
What put it into my head was that during the war a woman called Constance Ellis did photography in her garden from her home in a sort of army hut and she photographed children and gave all the money she made to the Red Cross.
And there I am when I was 12, 10.
Photographed by her.
Photographed by her. And here when we were old, I would load up my sister myself.
And with that introduction we so enjoyed those days we spent with her and I thought to myself when I was about 12, 13, 14 that it would be a very nice career.
And I have a letter from her because we wrote to her when I became 18 and asked whether she would take me as a pupil and she wrote back and said no, she wasn't prepared to do that.
But she advised me to be trained at the London Polytechnic which is what I did.
The early years of my childhood were spent in India where my father was an officer in the Indian Army and when my parents finally returned to England in 1922 they chose to settle in Swanwich partly because of the nearby PNEU Quaker School to which they sent my sister and me.
You see it wasn't really Victorian town, it was Edwardian. But by the time they came, 1920, it was already becoming a resort.
After I had trained in photography, I worked for a year for a photographer called Donald Donovan who had a studio in Freighton and he said if you live in Swanwich why don't you start in a seaside resort like that?
Because if you want to start your own studio, because you'll get seasonal like I do, he did, and you'll have a lot of children to photograph.
And this is what my mother and father backed me to do. I mean they were extraordinarily liberal and helpful when I looked back on it.
But they were anxious that I should have a career, certainly my mother. With children I would take that with sunlight coming through the window, that kind of photograph.
And this one we were very proud of because we were offered thirty pounds by Glaxo if the mother would agree to letting her child appear and the mother would not agree.
We were using Rolex, miniature film, two and a quarter, two and a quarter, one twenty size for children, but for adults I still used half plate for a long long time because we still thought we had to retouch.
We only left off half plate by 1936, but mainly portraits close up, not full length. Sometimes the hands would come into the photograph, but mainly the head.
And I was interested in the shapes of people's faces, much more than in their expression.
But mainly it was stressing the bone structure, not just profiles, but three quarter face. And I think it runs through almost all the successful photographs we took was this question of the turn of the head, sit usually square on.
I disliked the sort of photograph where the girl sits sideways and looks over her shoulder coily at you. It had to be full shoulder and then the turn of the head and then if possible the eyes doing something different.
Again this girl with the stress on her, the bone structure, and the same angle, and here, this is a very early one, and the line of her neck always like that, and the turn of the head and even the eyes doing something different again.
We were on the jetty, which still exists, herrings were brought in, and although I didn't bargain to photograph events in the town, I was interested in this kind of photograph.
And then I took the miner and I asked him to come in, and he was busking, just begging, with his violin, on the jetty where the fishermen were.
I didn't think to take him out there, my training had been to take portraits in a studio with artificial light, or daylight, and this affected me very much seeing these miners begging in the streets.
They came from south Wales, all along the south coast. This here's Botticelli, which one grew up with and knew, instinctively as children we knew these paintings, and we would study them in real detail.
That would have been my first experience of art, of how I knew anything about art, or the names of early artists.
My business in Swanish was strictly seasonal, so when I was introduced to someone interested in career and photography, and with £200 to invest, our partnership was formed.
Lettuce Ramsey was based in Cambridge, the lively widow of a brilliant Cambridge Don, with two young children to support. We got on at once.
She was very fond of men, and men were very fond of her. She was a very attractive personality. She was a very good listener. I used to be puzzled, why is she so popular? It was mainly because she listened.
I think we got on very well, because she was a good business woman, better than I was. She saw the need to do this and advertise that.
But her basic attitude to portraiture was identical. Really? Yes. Natural. We liked people as they were, not too posed. We did rather rebel against the Dorothy Wilding and London fashion styles.
Of course, that suited Cambridge, because Cambridge also wasn't a very fashionable place in the sense that you dress smartly.
We always dressed casually, not the latest fashion, I would say. Mrs Ramsey was a very, very sociable person.
We used to throw the most wonderful parties in our studio, and she always had the principle of double the number of men as women.
Men have a habit of getting into corners and talking about their sounds and whatever their subject was. Therefore, if you were going to have any time as a woman, you had to have quite two to one.
That's what we did. Of course, there were a lot of men in the university town. It was, for me, a wonderful experience to meet so many different people.
These were people I had never met before. I was a soldier's daughter. I think they were a little worried by that.
I think my outlook would be rather more conventional than it was. I found them very unconventional in every way.
In the 1930s, about 1934, we were still using big individual negatives, and we practised this solarised partial reversal,
which had been discovered by Man Ray in Paris, and it was particularly suitable for portraits and for nudes.
The fun of the reversal process was that you could do it to any extent. You could partially reversal, totally reverse.
I think where it came best was I think my partner used it very effectively in photographs like this, where she photographed the head against the black background,
and then she would develop this, half-develop it, and while it was still wet, she would hold it under the enlarger, under a negative that she'd also photographed,
a piece of material, a pattern that she fenced in, and where the face had already developed, it no longer formed,
but in the black background it took the imprint off the length of material.
I can't remember ever selling a solarised partial reversal.
It never caught on for a portraiture at all. It really wasn't a seller. It was just fun to do. It was just an experiment.
Right from the start, we took it in turns to take photographs.
I would take on Monday, she would take on Tuesday, I on Wednesday, she on Thursday, and then we would develop and work in the dark room the following day,
the day we were not in the studio, and it didn't really, we never argued as to who we were photographing, who had booked.
Alastair Cook photographed by me, and Roger Fry photographed by Lettuce.
Not through Lettuce, but just through, really, because he was a dorset man, and he had seen the dorset photographs that I had taken of the coast in our studio.
Someone had told him, if you go to Ramsey Mustford, you'll find somebody there who knows your dorset,
and he came in and asked to see the person who had taken the photographs of Dermald Dorn, Lullworth and so on.
And we met really that way.
My husband was a committed socialist who spent his career campaigning for reforms in the agricultural life of this country.
In 1936, I went on a holiday by myself, but joining with a group of architects through the society of cultural relations with the USSR,
I went to Russia for six weeks.
I wanted to see the countryside. I was a country person, and I felt that I would see much more how the ordinary person lived.
Every place of work in 1936 had its nursery school, so that women could work with the men.
It was impressive. I was very impressed.
When I got home, I had these photographs made into slides, which I showed before the war,
but during the war I was in great demand.
I showed them through various organisations, the Rural Community Council took me up around Oxfordshire,
because people were so surprised at the fight the Russians were putting up.
Oh, the comment was always the same. Why, they're just like us.
There was a colony of artists, dancers, singers, painters in Kof Castle at that time,
and Hilda and Mary Spencer Watson did wonderful dancing, mine.
They came to my studio to be photographed, and as it was already so patent,
the dancers themselves gained to this solarised system.
Well, yes, she thought these were the first photographs she'd ever seen that were photographs and not just records of objects.
They were an art form.
I must say I remember being very excited meeting your mother,
and all this colony of artists, it was very wonderful for me,
because I was a very ignorant middle-class girl who didn't really know nothing much about any form of art,
and you came over a period of years like 1932, when I think I was taking straight photography,
and in 1934 and five, those reversals were first.
I can remember spending hours preparing for this, because we didn't do just chances compositions that came in the dance.
They were specially made for Helen's photographs, and it was like making almost another mine for a still,
and trying to get the feeling of movement in the still photograph.
The last series I photographed was a mine portraying the rise of fascism in Europe.
It was the next year, 1936, that the Civil War broke out in Spain.
John Cornford, who is here photographed with his girlfriend, was killed very early on in the Spanish Civil War,
and that did shock Cambridge society.
I mean, it brought home to everyone the seriousness of that Spanish war.
And later in Southampton, my husband and I, we organised a boatload of food to go to Barcelona.
I've got photographs of that. I must find them.
I mean, it was very much in the atmosphere to be political.
In 1937, I went to South Wales to make documentary photographs of what I could see,
and this was organised by members of the Left Book Club, who invited people to come and see for themselves.
And it certainly made me more political than I already was, this feeling of waste of manpower and the poverty that one saw.
Did you ever want to use your photography as a campaigning tool in a very direct political way?
Oh, did you ever think of it?
I don't think I did. I don't think I...
I think I was very... I married in 1937, and I had agreed with my husband to be the main earner in the family,
and I really stuck to photography as a business.
To go around to photograph people in their own homes, I had this piece of apparatus carrying this quite heavy box,
and then I would set up the lights, screw them in, and that always enabled me to take photographs at any...
I didn't use flash for portraiture if I could help it.
Flash came along later when one did colour, but I usually put up two.
That's one round.
And if they were children, they were always quite interested to see this happening, getting ready as it were.
One would have toys, and we always had to let them touch whatever they had.
And first I would get a photograph of showing them the sparkler,
and then I'd hand the sparkler over to them to use.
And when they had that, then I would show them this magnet toy, which is quite clever,
and we'd make them count how many times we could get it up without giving it another jiggle.
And again, you could get three or four photographs with that.
And then, of course, with smaller children, one had these little puppets and hand puppets,
where we made them talk to each other.
I would use one of my assistants to help me.
And again, I like the three-quarter angle of me and everybody's face,
so children looking slightly to one side.
How did you manage your family?
It was very difficult.
I always had to have a housekeeper because I actually left the village in which we lived,
so I had to have someone.
And it was hard because I had a handicapped child as well as two normal children,
so that all round I think it was a very hard time in their youth.
And probably they were, in modern standards, neglected.
We had time to experiment and we had time to earn money.
In those days, we didn't photograph weddings because there was no need.
The portraits brought in enough income.
Later, we found wedding photography was the basic money earner
because in every wedding you have three orders.
You have the bride, the bride's mother, and the bride's mother ordering.
So we did every Saturday through our later period photograph weddings.
There can't have been much room to experiment in a wedding.
None at all.
I think I just happened to work in a period in 40 years
when it was possible to make a living in portrait photography.
It was hard work.
It was hard work.
Helen Muspratt was the last of our five women photographers.
Next week, a new series looking into paintings.
On ITV in a few minutes, there's a full house, so why not stay with Channel 4
when the new Enlightenment looks at the world.
