Claire and I were very sad to learn about the death of Paddy Summerfield.
Paddy had been photographing, principally Oxford, since the 1970s, but it was only in the last decade that the work began to receive the acclaim that it deserved through a remarkable series of books. They began with a tender study of his ageing parents, Mothers and Father (2014), which gave prominence to his back garden, a subject celebrated in last year’s Photo Oxford Festival which included responses to it by Vanessa Winship, Siân Davey, Matthew Finn, Alex Schneideman, Alys Tomlinson, Nik Roche and Jem Southam. A remarkable stream of books followed Mother and Father: The Oxford Pictures 1968-1978 (2016), Empty Days (2018), The Holiday Pictures (2019), Home Movie (2021) and The Beginnings of Eternity (2024).
The subject matter may have been quotidian but there was a visionary quality to Paddy’s work. To enter his world - to listen to him speak about favoured topics such as the Beatles (especially John Lennon), his life, or religion - was to leave with our perception heightened. When we last saw Paddy he was watching telly evangelists on a cable tv channel and I always felt there was a spiritual, as well as an emotional, intensity that ran through even the most prosaic of his pictures.
It was a privilege to go back and forth with him and Patricia on the sequencing of his book Empty Days, which I consider one of his greatest achievements, and it was special to receive dummies for proposed future publications. In response to one of these, I wrote an unpublished text that concludes with a tribute to Paddy:
“It seems to me that your great achievement in these pictures is to use the least poetic of mediums – photography - to create poetry. In this realm between the conscious and unconscious, between what we see and what we know, between what we experience and what we remember, you present not just an outer but an inner world. While you look out, we look in.”
Paddy leaves behind a significant archive that is destined for the Bodleian Libraries, thousands of unseen pictures, and maquettes for future books. It is a rich legacy.
