Paddy Summerfield (18 February 1947 – 11 April 2024) was a British photographer who lived and worked in
Oxford all his life.[1]
Summerfield is known for his "evocative series of black and white images, shot on 35mm film, which co-opt the traditional genre of documentary photography to realise a more personal and inward looking vision."[1] He has said his photographs are exclusively about abandonment and loss.[1]
Life and career
Paddy Summerfield was born on 18 February 1947.[2] After taking an Art Foundation course at the
Oxford Polytechnic, Summerfield attended
Guildford School of Art, studying firstly in the Photography Department, then joining the Film department[3] the following year. In 1967, when still a first-year student, he made photographs that appeared in 1970 in
Bill Jay's magazine Album.[4] Between 1968 and 1978, Summerfield documented
Oxford University students in the summer terms.[3] His pictures published in Creative Camera, and on its cover in January 1974, were recognised as psychological and expressionist,[by whom?] unusual in an era of journalistic and documentary photography. Throughout his life, Summerfield has focused on making photographic essays that are personal documents.[3] From 1997 to 2007 he photographed his parents, his mother with
Alzheimer's disease and his father caring for her.[3]
1974: Co-Optic Real Britain, 19 February – 9 March. With Co-Optic group members
Martin Parr,
Chris Steele-Perkins, Peter Turner, and Nick Hedges.
1975: Young British Photographers, with
Brian Griffin, Chris Steele-Perkins, etc, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford;
The Photographers' Gallery, London; then travelling UK, Europe, USA[2]
^
abcdefghijklmnoPotted biography of Summerfield; in
Gerry Badger and John Benton-Harris (ed), Through the Looking Glass: Photographic Art in Britain 1945–1989 (London: Barbican Art Gallery, 1989), p. 197.
^"Paddy Summerfield: New talent", Album, issue 2 (March 1970), pp. 43–45. Jay made a PDF of this available from his website (which no longer exists);
here is a 26 April 2012
Wayback Machine copy of this.