Hello. My name is Jessica Sutcliffe and I'm the daughter of photographer Helen Muskrat.
This paper describes my research and the development of the book I wrote about my mother.
This one here. It underlines my subsequent efforts to put together and to find a home for the headed Muskrat archive.
The research began with gathering documents, letters, photographs and negatives which lay scattered about the house,
the house being the house that I presently live in and the house that my mother lived in towards the end of her life,
and also the house that her parents bought in 1933.
So you can imagine the amount, the accumulation of stuff in that house, including all my mother's archive, which is not going to the vault, Lynn.
My mother rarely threw things away and I unearthed over 2000 prints,
many of which had been printed by Helen herself for the purpose of display in her various shop windows and passages.
I very soon realised that I was in possession of a vast amount of material which would eventually need a permanent home.
Before I start. I have been asked to tell you a bit about myself, and it is interesting to note how huge my mother's influence was on my life.
I was a diligent schoolgirl. I went to school in Oxford at Milham Ford School, and my decision to study architecture was strongly supported by her.
She was very happy about my marriage and I went on to have three children, as she had done while carrying on a career as a self-employed architect.
Later, she offered to pay for me to do an M.A. in building conservation at York University,
thereby fulfilling an even greater maternal ambition to immerse myself in building conservation.
When I retired, we moved from Hebden Bridge in Yorkshire to Swanage to live in her old family home.
I at last had time to spare and decided to write a book about my mother featuring her
amazing photographs and a memoir of her life all the time when I was writing my book.
I was conscious that we needed to find a home for the archive.
It is hard to pinpoint the moment when I realised the importance of producing a book about my mother.
But the idea of writing about her life started in Shimla in India.
I went there with my husband Robyn in 2006. We had been on a study tour to Delhi and the Grah,
organised by York University's Department of Conservation Studies, where I was teaching at the time.
We decided to extend our visit by going to see the place where my mother was.
A little girl had spent her summers armed with an old family album.
We sought out the places where she lived in 1911. We identified most of them almost unchanged after 100 years.
I began to think about her life until we realised what an interesting story there was to tell.
And I wrote a diary about our journey. Germination took another six years.
In 2012, I was told that my daughter in New Zealand waiting for her first child to arrive.
Robin had gone off to Japan for a week on business,
and I found myself fearing intensely lonely in a little bungalow surrounded by abandoned dwellings damaged by the recent earthquake.
I started to jot down some of the personal memories of my childhood, my relationship with my mother,
and piecing together the events of her life as far as I knew about them.
I realised for the first time that I enjoyed expressing myself through writing.
But before I describe my subsequent journey, it is necessary to provide a short story of her life.
Helen was born in India, the daughter of a soldier in the Indian army.
As you can imagine, Colonial Life involved frequent visits to photographers to record family events for the folks back home.
When the family returned to live in England, they regularly visited photographer Constance Ellis and Gilford,
who took this charming photograph of Helen and her sister, Joan.
During subsequent sittings, she inspired hand study photography at the Regent Street Polytechnic.
While studying there, she photographed her aunt, the violinist May Hope, which already demonstrated a mature approach to portraiture.
Helen was also influenced by Francis Newbery, the retired head of the Glasgow School of Art,
who had commissioned his pupil, Charles Rennie Mackintosh, to design his new school of art in Glasgow.
These photographs were taken in 1930, when she was only 20.
Francis and his wife Jessie, had retired to coach.
Castle became family. Friends near my mother's own words taught me all I know about art.
Helen opened her first studio in Swanage in 1929 and immediately caught the eye of the Professional Photographer magazine who described her.
Work has shown great versatility of ideas and technique.
In 1932, from Newberry introduced her to Lettuce Ramsey, whose husband, Frank, a brilliant Cambridge mathematician,
had recently died, leaving her with two young daughters shown in this photograph by Helen.
She was looking for interesting work. And together they decided to set up a second studio in Cambridge.
The firm Ramsey and Muskrat was established. Helen was now mixing with a vibrant set of idealistic intellectuals during term time
and returning to Swanage for the summer months where business was flourishing, as Lettice described it in an article in the Sunday Times.
Helen had to know how, and I had the Connexions.
A chance viewing of man raised satirised photographs at a magazine led to experiments with this technique.
Soler ization involved the momentary exposure of negatives to light during the development process,
giving on giving Annenberg use of effect of positive and negative with a dark outline to enhance the image.
They also played with other techniques, such as multiple exposure drill graphs, using fabrics to enhance the image.
The results were truly original and exciting.
This photograph of the surrealist artist only Nagar, lying with her head over the arm of the sofa was taken in Swanage.
And this is one of my mother's most celebrated images. Helen was also pursuing an interest in documentary photograph photography.
She visited the Soviet Union in 1936, travelling to Leningrad and Moscow,
and then boarded a steamer to travel down the Volga to Ukraine to look at state and collective farms.
The following year, Helen spent time in the Welsh mining Malet Valiance, where she recorded memorable images of poverty, unemployment and resilience.
The 1930s proved to be the most creative period of their working life when the two women
photographers sparking off each other produced most of their important and best known work.
Eventually, Helen opened a studio in Oxford. While that is, RAMSI remained in Cambridge, they each held an exhibition of their work in their studios,
advertised with striking modernist images now married to Jack.
Gunmen committed but poorly paid Communist Party organiser. A joint decision was made that she should become the main breadwinner.
The war interviewee intervened, and pressures of work, together with raising three children left little time for experimentation and documentary work.
Both Helen and letters turned to conventional studio life and supporting their families for the next 40 years.
Helen ran her studio in Coal Market, Oxford, and became established as a remarkable portrait photographer.
This photograph of novelist Naomi Mitchinson was taken in the studio while this one of Lord and Lady Beveridge,
being interviewed by ABC Television in 1956, was taken in the home.
Both Leches and Helen retired the same year in 1977. These photographs of each in their own studios by John Lawrence Jones appeared in
the Sunday Times magazine just before the studios were closed in some in 1978.
Books were being written about the notorious Cambridge spies.
Lettice Ramsey knew many of them, and her photographs of Burgess and MacLane appeared in Sun newspaper magazines.
However, it was not until the 1980s that real interest was shown in the work of Ramsey and Muskrat.
This was largely thanks to Val Williams, who was commissioned by the National Museum of Film and Photography in Bradford to write a book.
Women Photographers. The Other Observers. Nineteen hundred two, 1950.
This feature, the work of Helen Muskrat, but she was irritated to find that her famous photograph on the front of the book was printed upside down.
The book was accompanied by an exhibition in Bradford which travelled to the photographer's gallery in London and elsewhere around the country.
There followed a TV series for Channel four,
five women photographers and a further half hour programme about Helen Musselburgh, the BBC series Women of Our Century.
In both programmes, she was filmed in her filmed in her dining room with her prints spread randomly on the table in front of her,
picking out examples to illustrate her points. This is a picture of Helen.
Taken in the early thirties by Lettice Ramsey, it shows a confident and modern young woman following her own chosen career.
There is little doubt that all this interest in women photographers was also inspired by the women's movement.
Most the people who interviewed Helen were young women,
and they were interested to know how she managed to combine an artistic life with running a business and bringing up a family.
They wanted to know about the barriers she had encountered and whether she had been motivated by feminism.
She was somewhat mystified and amused. There were no barriers.
She just got on with it. Sometimes it was an advantage to be a woman.
But later in life,
she acknowledged that agreeing to be come the main breadwinner in order to further the cause of socialism had been at a considerable personal cost,
both to her creativity and emotional energy. My mother was not becoming a minor celebrity.
At last, her work was accepted as an important contribution to the world of photography.
A further happy outcome of all this activity was such a great deal of material never existed in her own words,
which would provide invaluable information for me to draw on.
In writing the book, not only did I have recordings of her TV interviews,
but also eight hours of recorded conversations between my mother and Val
Williams made for the Oral History Photography Project for the British Library.
My research began with chyme combing through all this information.
It was a strange experience to watch her on the screen and to listen to her voice.
Ten years after her death, I also sought out interviews with numerous people who had known Helen or had shown an interest in her work.
I started with the women who worked with her in her coal market studio who were still living.
They described a convivial, everyday life of the business, the way she conducted sittings,
overhearing her conversations with customers from behind the curtains, which divided the studio from the work room and the hard work in the darkroom.
And before Christmas, before Christmas and their fondness for their employer,
I spent many hours in the Library of the National Museum of Film and Photography in Bradford.
Now the National Media Museum.
Reading through the photographic magazines of the thirties and discovering references to and examples of my mother's work,
they included an important nude with a nude with a hoop taken at the Swanage studio
and previously unknown to me when working on the first chapters of the book.
I was contact contacted by Duncan Forbes', curator of photography at the National Galleries of Scotland, who came to see my collection of photographs.
I also visited him in Edinburgh to see his wonderful exhibition of photographs by eight is due to Heart.
He was one of the first to convince me about the importance of writing about Helen.
I was hugely supportive in my endeavour. I also made contact with letters Ramsey's grandson,
who had a small but valuable collection of images of some of her favourite people from the early Cambridge days.
They included one of her lovers, Julian Bell, who had introduced her to Bloom Bloomsbury set family at Charleston.
It was an exciting time. So many fascinating memories and stories emerged.
I talked to Peter Luft, who had taken over the Cambridge studio with its entire collection of prints,
negatives, many dating from the 30s when Ramsey and Muskrat carried out so much pioneering work.
He has a useful website featuring portraits of the famous Cambridge intellectuals I photographed in the 1930s.
One of my most rewarding meetings with was with Anthony Penrose at his family home, Farly Farmhouse.
I had been captivated by his book about his mother, the lives of Lee Miller, an extraordinary photographer,
and her extraordinary life story, which could only have been written with such knowledge and intimacy by her own child.
It gave me great encouragement to find that one could combine a fantastic album of photographs with a vivid memoir of the artist.
Anthony was kind enough to allow me to model my book on his and to follow progress.
As the finished article emerged with several chapters draughted and beginning to select the accompanying illustrations.
I realised I wanted the book to be designed in a distinctive manner and was fortunate to choose graphic designer Alan Ward based in Manchester,
whose work we already knew and did.
But I was living in Wakefield at the time and it was easy to drive across the Pennines to Manchester for regular meetings.
Allen had worked closely with the Manchester University Press and suggested that we approached them with a view to publishing the book.
I had failed to interest suitable publishers such as Virago and Temp's Hudson.
I was intending to self publish, but here was another stroke of luck to be backed by a prestigious university publishing house.
I did academic recognition to a project which might easily have been dismissed as amateur.
They also provided other professional inputs, such as editing and indexing.
Gradually, the book became a reality. As chapters emerged and illustrations were added, each page carefully designed.
My work in partnership with Ireland culminated with a visit to get it to the chosen printers to watch the pages roll off the press.
Assess the quality of the print and sign each other off on the 3rd of November.
Twenty fifteen. The book was born.
I was now able to approach the world armed with a copy of the book, which surpassed all my expectations and established a book.
Helen must but something to be taken notice of and disseminated.
I was now convinced that I might be able to persuade galleries and institutions to consider exhibitions and set about trying to make this happen.
There had already been small exhibitions of foot photographs in Swanage shown here Halifax and Hebden Bridge,
but I felt that it was time to interest the major players, some of whom already had collections of her work.
I sent out copies of the book to the National Portrait Gallery, the Tate, the Victoria and Albert Museum,
the Photographers Gallery Kettle's Yard in Cambridge and the Ashmolean in Oxford.
And many were followed up with meetings while nothing came directly from this.
I was still convinced that one day something would happen and continue to pursue venues and promote the book.
Notwithstanding rejections and disappointment, another piece of fortunate serendipity occurred when the Pellant Palant House
gallery in Chichester agreed to put on a small exhibition in that print room.
I had previously that one or two.
Matt Ramsey and must print images for their exhibition about the Spanish Civil War and director Simon Martin recognised the quality of their work.
This important photograph by Lettice Ramsay is a Ray Peters and the Marxist poet John Cornford.
A year before he was killed fighting with the International Brigade on his 21st birthday and
this of Basque refugee children arriving on the docks at Southampton was photographed by Helen.
There were nearly 4000 children arrived on that boat.
And it's very interesting to come trust the fact that they were allowed to arrive in this country with our present government's attitude to refugees.
The exhibition coincided with publication of the book,
and I was able to benefit from the excellent publicity department's promotion of both the exhibition and the book.
It has taken some time to mention, again, the Helen Muskrat archive. But throughout all this activity, the problem was lurking.
What should I do about all this stuff?
I was by now fully retired and living in her house and Swanage, the lovely rambling old house overlooking the sea.
Her parents had bought in 1933 in numerous dilapidated sheds, garages, attics and dusty corners were scattered.
30 year old to get tins. Tin biscuit, yes, biscuit tins full of negatives.
The card indexes of 30000 sitting's boxes of cameras, portfolios of friends, family snaps, letters, articles, paraphernalia.
Friends and colleagues kept telling me it all needed to be kept sorted and archived.
And I was anxious not to leave it all for my children to deal with.
The solution came as with so much of this story, through another important contact at the open of the Palant exhibition, I was greeted by Colin Ford,
who had been director of the photographic museum and met Ben Bradford in 1986 and oversaw the exhibition of women's photography.
He remembered Helen well from all the openings, visits and conferences connected with it,
and was delighted to discover that she was again being recognised.
We exchanged books mine on Helen Muskrat, and here's a wonderful book on the early photographer Julia Margaret Cameron.
He attended a lecture I gave in Cambridge and we ate together afterwards.
I explained that I was now turning my attention to securing a home for the archive.
Why don't you try the BUTLIN? I know that they are interested in acquiring wealth collections of photography.
I had already sent a copy of my book to the director, Richard Ovenden, and he had complimented me on its content and design.
But I was not expecting the welcome I received.
A meeting was arranged and yes, he would like the archive to come to the board and all of it, all the prints.
However small and insignificant, all these disintegrating tins of negatives, all the letters and papers, please don't throw anything away.
Moreover,
he was hoping that an exhibition could be arranged to celebrate the acquisition and the generous foyer space of the newly refurbished Western Library.
Robin and I were working, walking on air.
How amazed Helen would have been to know that her work would be treasured in a world famous library in Oxford,
where she had spent so much of her working life.
The catch came when I realised just how much work I faced before I could assemble and send all this material.
Two and a half years elapsed before I could dispatch the final boxes.
I felt that I had responsibilities to sort out the material and realised that I was
the person best placed to categorise and arrange all the 2000 prints into boxes,
put names and dates to some of them and decipher the numerous notes scribbled on the back of my mother in old age.
She realised that in the future someone somewhere might want to know.
This will not be the final version of the catalogue, but it should make someone else's task easier.
The archive is properly recorded by staff at the Bogalay.
And so what started out as a few scribbles and memoirs in 2012 turned out to be a major personal project.
Sometimes I felt overwhelmed by it all. But the journey has been fascinating for beginning to end.
No, not the end, because it continues. I am particularly aware that justice has yet to be given to Helen's partner.
That is Ramsey.
Both regard to her work, her unconventional life and the collection of the Cambridge studio, which will eventually reside with the Cambridge Library.
I have met so many wonderful people on the way and learnt so much about photography.
My mother and her art.
The crowning achievement is to know that her archive will sit safely alongside so many important historic documents and to be available to all.
We still have to pinch ourselves when we remember what has been achieved, particularly with regard to the body and archive.
Thank you.