Recollections, by Mark Haworth-Booth
I first encountered Edwin Smith's photographs when an undergraduate. My supervisor at Cambridge, Dr John Newton, had one or two on the mantelpiece of his room at Clare. I am pretty sure he had a print (about 11x14 inches) of the 'Caprarola, Villa Farnese: Terminal figure'. It occurs in The Wonders of Italy (1965), plate 93.
Buying and displaying photographs was an unusual activity in 1966. Years later at the V & A Sir Roy Strong proposed an exhibition of Edwin's work to mark the publication of a retrospective survey of his career by his widow Olive Cook in 1984. As Curator I started corresponding with Olive in August of that year. Someone had told me, quite wrongly, that she was 'difficult', so I must have written with anxious care—only to receive a typically effusive, kindly and cogent letter in reply. So began one of my most cherished friendships. I always loved visiting The Coach House at Saffron Walden where Olive looked as regal and sturdy as a piece in walrus ivory from the Lewis chess set in the British Museum.
I have been revisiting Edwin's and Olive's books. As so often seems to be the case, in retrospect, they recognised and rode a wave that seems to have vanished after they made their great contribution. The large-format art book, printed in photogravure and accompanied by erudite notes, passed away not long after Edwin's early death in 1971. So did another great vehicle of their partnership, those intriguing miscellanies published annually from 1941 to 1975 as The Saturday Book. In that publication, perhaps because Edwin considered photography a way of buying time for his preferred vocation as painter, printmaker and draughtsman, he preserved a kind of visual wit and playfulness in his photographs, a touch not easily emulated. In a post-Edwin book by Olive, The English Country House (1974), for which that fine professional A. F. Kersting provided the photographs, despite their brilliance there is something missing—a compositional elegance and, perhaps, a poetic spirit. The reproduction quality had also—in that year of major economic distress— lost its sparkle. Olive's prose had not however, and I noted in particular a remark about William Morris's Red House, designed by Philip Webb, at Bexleyheath. The Guardian Review has debated recently whether the meanness of the servants' quarters undermines Morris's status as a social visionary. Olive's caption to a photograph of the Red House jumped out at me: 'Its revolutionary features include windows in the servants' quarters which gave them unrestricted views of the garden.'
Olive, a scholarship girl, referred to Edwin's upbringing in 'very poor' circumstances in Camden Town. She prided herself on having carved out a living as a freelance writer, as Edwin had as a much sought-after photographer who maintained many other visual interests.
The Saturday Book in particular gave them a place in which to celebrate the robust, vivid, anonymous vernacular they liked to find, collect and think about. They loved cast-iron kitchen ranges, toy theatre prints, carved meerschaum pipes, rare English playing-cards, Japanese block-printed matchbox covers, fancifully designed and printed orange wrappers, Victorian glass paper-weights, the impossibly vivid illustrations of exotic plants published in such compilations as Dr R. J. Thornton's Temple of Flora (1799-1805), pictures made of wool, shells, paper, glass, sand or seaweed, Bilston enamel boxes, hand-tied salmon flies, Edwardian postcards, tin-plate advertisements . . . They had a clear-eyed, unsentimental perception of such things—in fact, while exploring the Victorian vernacular, they were at the same time inventing the modern domestic interior.
The distinguished photographer Tessa Traeger, who worked for Edwin when she left college in the 1950s, recalls the pattern of living established by Edwin and Olive at their Victorian terraced house in Swiss Cottage: sanded floors, white paint, and an abundance of house plants—a decorative scheme that was to become much imitated.
Their aesthetics owed much to the spirited vernacular tradition they rediscovered and cherished, but also to the Arts and Crafts Movement with its regard for honest craft. Edwin's work as a photographer is in a line that can be drawn from his Victorian predecessors Frederick Hollyer and Frederick H. Evans, through Eugene Atget to Walker Evans in the USA. Olive has written that he owned only one photographic book, the classic volume Atget: Photographe de Paris (1930). His copy, sumptuously bound in purple silk, was given to the V & A along with seventy of his photographs in 1985.
We can never predict how we will say goodbye to our friends. With Olive I was lucky. I arranged an exhibition titled Seeing Things: Photographing Objects at the V & A last year. As a tribute to Edwin I hung his 'Cottage Interior, Lightmoor, Shropshire' (1953) next to a famous photograph of a sharecropper's cabin by Walker Evans who was, like Edwin, a close student of Atget. I asked Olive if she would supply the caption. She sent a marvellous text, written in the very room while Edwin was taking the photograph—at 12.20 on 19 September 1953. It was, in the end, a homage to both of them. This will be repeated when the book Things (V&A/Jonathan Cape), based on the exhibition, is published next year. Olive's text and Edwin's photographs are acutely observed but they offer something more than description: the spirit that inhabits each artefact when
'the mid-day sun, streaming through the one small window, reveals and accentuates every telling detail of the interior...'
MARK HAWORTH-BOOTH
(Then) Senior Curator of Photographs
Victoria & Albert Museum
August 2003
Reproduced from Stone
Trough Books Catalogue 15;
Used with permission
