Humphrey Spender, 94; Painter, Photographer

Humphrey Spender, an artist, textile designer and pioneer of British documentary photography -- who recorded the stark life of the poor in Depression-era England much as Dorothea Lange and her contemporaries captured that period in America -- has died. He was 94.

Spender, a brother of the poet Stephen Spender, died March 11 of heart failure at his home in the English town of Ulting in Essex.

Though he was an accomplished painter and spent most of his time after 1950 designing and teaching textile art, Humphrey Spender was best known for his photography from the 1930s.

Recruited by anthropologist Tom Harrisson for the largely volunteer Mass Observation project, he worked with painters, poets, social scientists and filmmakers to document the lives of the working class in the 1930s in Bolton and Blackpool, England, much as Lange and other artists worked for the Works Progress Administration in the United States.

Spender once said that when he arrived in Bolton in industrial northwestern England, “I felt very much a foreigner.... and the whole landscape, the townscape, was severe and apprehensive. The experience was alarming and depressing, because of the evident poverty.”

Unlike his American counterparts, Spender worked primarily with a concealed camera in an effort to record the most natural scenes possible.

In black and white, he photographed the gritty life of the humblest workers, the unemployed, shabby bedrooms, street markets, funerals, pubs, women scrubbing stoops or hanging laundry, the look of terror after an eviction notice.

Spender embraced the project as a way to use photography for social documentation.

“The most valid and proper use of a camera is [as] a means of recording aspects of human behavior,” the London Guardian quoted him as saying late in his life. “As time passes, social-documentary photographs gain in interest, whereas the ‘beautiful photograph’ ... progressively loses interest, becomes boring.”

His negatives, stored in metal cans for 40 years, were rediscovered in the late 1970s after their transfer to Sussex University. They were incorporated into the book “Worktown People,” published in 1982 and used in subsequent exhibits to illustrate a slice of social history.

Spender’s reputation had also received a boost in 1975 when the Royal College of Art, where he taught textiles, published the book “Britain in the Thirties: Photographs by Humphrey Spender.”

The photographer was correct -- his realistic documentary photos had in time become fascinating glimpses of a lost history.

In 1997, another book, “Humphrey Spender’s Humanist Landscapes: Photo-Documents, 1932-1942,” was published to coincide with a retrospective of Spender’s photographs at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven, Conn.

Spender disparaged his own fame, however, telling the Guardian newspaper in a 2000 interview: “I was not ‘one of the most important prewar documentary photographers’ -- there were plenty of other people doing it. I’ve been called ‘the father of documentary photography.’ It’s been said that I ‘gave ordinary man his place in history.’ Absolute rubbish.”

Born in the Hampstead area of London, he studied art history in the late 1920s in Freiburg, Germany, where he absorbed the realist art movement.

He also graduated from London’s Architectural Assn. School of Architecture but never practiced.

Spender, who received his first camera at age 9, was largely a self-taught photographer. He also picked up techniques from his brother Michael, an employee of the German manufacturer of the Leica camera he would make his own.

After completing his education, Spender established himself as a commercial and portrait photographer.

He created an iconic portrait of novelist Christopher Isherwood, a friend, and designed the dust jacket of Isherwood’s “Goodbye to Berlin” in 1939.

Another Spender photo was reproduced on the 1973 book “Christopher and His Kind.”

Spender went on to become a staff photographer, or “lensman,” for the Daily Mirror newspaper and later the Picture Post weekly.

During World War II, he was a photographer for Britain’s Ministry of Information, the War Office and the Intelligence Service, for which he helped create maps for the D-day landings in France.

After a few postwar years back at the Picture Post, Spender abandoned photography for art and textile design, saying editors wanted pretty pictures rather than his documentary work.

Twice widowed, Spender is survived by his third wife, Rachel; two sons, David and Quentin; and four grandchildren.