| Names: | Born: John Humphrey Spender
Pen: Lensman
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| | Dates: | 1910, 19 April - 2005, 11 March | | Born: | UK, London, Hampstead | | Active: | UK |
British photographer and painter who photographed for ‘Picture Post‘ using the nickname ‘Lensman‘. In the 1930s he was involved in the ‘Mass Observation‘ project and took photographs for the ‘Worktown‘ project an early sociological experiment on working class life in Great Britain. During the Second World War he was an Official War Photographer.
In 1978 an exhibition on "Mass Observation" was held at Sussex University, UK.Preparing biographies
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Family history
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| Wikipedia has a biography of this photographer. | | Go to website | | Getty Research, Los Angeles, USA has an ULAN (Union List of Artists Names Online) entry for this photographer. This is useful for checking names and they frequently provide a brief biography. | | Go to website |
The following books are useful starting points to obtain brief biographies but they are not substitutes for the monographs on individual photographers. |
| "As time passes, social—documentary photographs gain interest, whereas the ‘beautiful photograph‘ … progressively losses interest, becomes boring." | | "I was not ‘one of the most important prewar documentary photographers‘ — there were plenty of other people doing it. I‘ve been called ‘the father of documentary photography.‘ It‘s been said that I ‘gave the ordinary man his place in history.‘ Absolute rubbish." | | "The most valid and proper use of a camera is [as] a means of recording aspects of human behavior." |
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