In obscura espionage definition archive#
In obscura espionage definition skin#
In obscura espionage definition professional#

Hulton Archive, Fox Photos/Getty Images.īy contrast, additional lighting must have been present out of shot in Tudor-Hart's version ( Fig. We find the same in Figure 3.4, of the Institute of Ray Therapy in Camden, but whereas the photographer has managed to use one child's arm as a shield for the arc lamp on the left, the glaring actinic light of the second arc lamp has evaded its shield and burnt the sensitive film to the point of producing a ‘black sun’. Here the back of the child is engulfed in blackness, presenting a striking silhouette, because the only lighting in the room was produced by the arc lamp itself. 7 Note, for example, the back of the central child in a photograph reproduced in Victor Dane's The Sunlight Cure of open arc phototherapy at an unspecified London hospital ( Fig. 6 Her photograph is unusual in its handling of the light while several photographs exist with this composition, where the photographer's camera was placed behind a patient-‘screen’, rarely are they so well lit – or so expertly printed, I suspect – without succumbing to overexposure or dramatic silhouettes ( Figs. 5 But even professionals struggled to take legible photographs of phototherapy in process.

In obscura espionage definition professional#

Tudor-Hart was a professional photographer known for her technical adroitness, including her ability to control lighting. 4 A few centimetres off and the emanating actinic light of the lamp would have overexposed the film, ‘injuring’ the negative and thus ruining the shot. By positioning herself behind this child, her medium format Rolleiflex camera held at waist height, Tudor-Hart produced a legible negative under exceptionally difficult lighting circumstances. It is important that it does so, because the child acted a shield, or screen, for Tudor-Hart's camera and its photosensitive film. The photograph presents the lamp slightly off -centre in the composition, yet the real focus is the largest of the six children undergoing ultraviolet exposure, whose arms gracefully interlace in the photograph with the shadows of the child opposite him, and whose body takes centre stage.

In obscura espionage definition skin#

They did so guided by nurses, as much to entertain them during these exposures – which could last from several minutes up to two hours – as to maximise the surface area of their exposed skin to the lamp. The children encircled the lamp behind a fixed railing, which marked of the correct distance from the lamp for the exposure, and playfully opened their arms to its actinic light. Figure 3.1 depicts the treatment taking place, as was usual, in a darkened, enclosed interior space, the curtains and door shut and overhead lighting switched off. Unlike the Finsen lamp, which focused and channelled the carbon arc's actinic light through telescopic arms and quartz lenses for a local (lesion-specific) exposure, this carbon arc lamp's open flame emanated unfiltered in all directions. The rich actinic light of a large, suspended carbon arc lamp was employed for general (full body) use on local children. Wolfgang Suschitzky and the London Metropolitan Archives, London.īeautiful and eerie, the composition cleverly presents an otherwise resistant subject for the photographer: open arc phototherapy in process. The South London Hospital for Women and Children (Birmingham: Kynoch Press, 1935), p. 3Įdith Tudor-Hart, Treatment by Ultraviolet Rays, c. While Figure 3.2 was printed to be reproduced in the pamphlet and put on display at the hospital, Figure 3.1 mysteriously did not make the cut. 3.2), part of a commission she undertook alongside fellow émigré photographer Grete Stern to illustrate the beneficent work of the institution for a 1935 fund-raising pamphlet. It was one of at least two she made of the phototherapy facilities at the hospital ( Fig.

In obscura espionage definition archive#

Printed for the first time from Tudor-Hart's secret archive for the recent retrospective exhibition, Edith Tudor-Hart: In the Shadow of Tyranny (Edinburgh, Vienna and Berlin, 2013–14), the image had only previously been an unseen and unused negative. Of all of the elements unusual and compelling in a photograph of the South London Hospital for Women and Children (SLHWC), taken around 1934 by Austrian émigré photographer and Comintern agent Edith Tudor-Hart (née Suschitzky, 1908–73), to me the most striking is the simple fact that the photograph exists ( Fig.

Light is not a passive agent of revelation in photography but a variable force through which representations are made. A similar effect is produced by a mercury vapour lamp. The light given out by burning magnesium (photographic ‘flash powder’) also causes explosive combination, as this light is very rich in actinic or short wave rays. The existence of invisible radiation beyond the limit of the visible spectrum … came to be termed ‘actinic’ or ‘chemical’ rays, as they were supposed to be necessary before chemical reactions could take place.