Kurt Hutton
Further images
Exhibitions
'Unchartered Streets' at Ben Uri Gallery & Museum, London in collaboration with the Centre for British Photography (17 January - 8 March 2024)Literature
"They had no Work", Picture Post, 14 January 1939, vol 2. no. 2, pp.50-52 (illustrated)Kurt Hutton, Speaking Likeness, Focal Press, 1947 (illustrated)
Creative Camera Internatonal Year Book, 1976 (This print illustrated p.198, and entitled "Midnight, Admiralty Arch, 1938")
The 14th January 1939 issue of Picture Post magazine
included a feature on unemployment entitled "They Had No Work". For
this article Kurt Hutton took a number of photographs at the Silver Lady's
Kitchen in Trafalgar Square, London, where proprietor Betty Baxter
(nicknamed 'The Silver Lady' for her donations of a silver sixpence to her many
patrons) offered a free meal to the area's homeless.
This is one of a group of strikingly dramatic character studies of the people
there, beautifully lit as though by candle or lamp-light. It was part of a
feature in Picture Post that gave a human face to poverty and unemployment.
In Picture Post this work is reproduced reversed as the far left image of a
spread of four close-ups of me, presumably as it worked better on the page to
have him looking inwards. It is captioned with the subject's name and with some
biographical information: