If you've had any training in a creative discipline, you've probably at least heard of the Bauhaus. Despite only being open for a few years (1919-1933), this groundbreaking German art school shaped modernist design and visual thinking and cast a long shadow over 20th-century photography. One of its students was Edith Tudor-Hart, a Jewish Austrian woman who studied there in 1928 and later settled in London, where she became one of Britain's most compelling documentary photographers. She also became a communist spy. And yet today, most people still haven't heard of her.
That oversight is finally being corrected. A Woman Named Edith, a new biography by Daria Santini, published by Yale University Press, tells Tudor-Hart's story in full for the first time. It's a remarkable one, and for photographers in particular, it raises some uncomfortable questions about whose work gets remembered and why.
