Spender, Humphrey

▪ 2006

      British photojournalist and artist (b. April 19, 1910, London, Eng.—d. March 11, 2005, Ulting, Essex, Eng.), chronicled the everyday lives of working-class Britons during the 1930s and '40s in a series of candid, often surreptitiously taken, photographs for the Mass-Observation Project, the journals Left Review and Picture Post, and the Daily Mirror. Many of these photographs were later rediscovered and compiled in such books as Worktown People: Photographs from Northern England, 1937–38 (1982) and Lensman: Photographs, 1932–1952 (1987). During the 1930s he also traveled across Europe with his brother poet Stephen Spender, capturing photographs of Germany and other countries as well as of his brother's friends, including novelist Christopher Isherwood. In the 1950s Spender became a respected painter and textile designer.

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