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Wolfgang Suschitzky |
How it all clicked for Wolfgang
WHAT can you say to a 97-year-old man who has reached the pinnacle of his career as a world-recognised photographer – and is still in demand from galleries keen to exhibit his work?
Answer: He’s a lucky man! And that is the title a gallery owner gave to his recent exhibition in Hamburg. She called the exhibition “I’m a lucky man!”
Urbane Wolfgang Suschitzky gave a slight smile as he told me this at his Maida Vale home on Tuesday. Although a modest man, it seems as if Wolfgang surprises himself with his bursts of energy. I had to squeeze a short interview in between his other commitments, before he started to arrange for a taxi to take him to an engagement in west London.
With amazing energy, Wolfgang gets about London daily, thinking nothing of taking large portfolios of his photographs by bus and Tube to the Islington gallery of Chambers in Long Lane, Barbican, where his latest exhibition opens this evening (Thursday).
It didn’t take him long when he arrived in London from Vienna in the mid-30s to establish himself as a sought-after still photographer. By the end of the decade he was working for one of the biggest documentary makers, Paul Rotha.
He powerfully captured street life in Soho and Charing Cross Road in the late 30s – though these only surfaced in a book 50 years later.
If you ask him who he worked for he can rattle off the big names in magazines and the cinema – the now-defunct Picture Post magazine, a series for the National Broadcasting Company in the US that took him all over the world, special assignments for the oil giant BP and the National Coal Board, all this until he became first choice for big feature film directors.
As director of photography, he worked his magic with
such films as Entertaining Mr Sloan, starring Harry Andrews and Beryl Reid, Ulysses by Joseph Strick, and Theatre of Blood with Vincent Price. “Vincent Price was a real gentleman,” said Wolfgang. “When he came on the set for the first time he introduced himself to everyone – from the electricians to all the cameramen.”
Perhaps, he made his name with the 1971 cult classic Get Carter, shot on location in Newcastle – Wolfgang was always more at home working outside the studio.
Before I could ask him about the star Michael Caine, Wolfgang said: “Michael Caine, now he was very professional. I couldn’t help but admire the way he always knew his lines, he’d obviously worked very hard at it.”
Wolfgang studied photography in Vienna where his father owned a bookshop. Life wasn’t always pleasant. He recalls how working-class districts in the city were shelled by the reactionary government, and then came the rise of anti-Semitism.
He came to London with his sister Edith – another inspiring photographer – and later his mother. Then came a pause. For once he looked less self-certain.
And his father? “He’d suffered from depression for some time, and one day he went to the bathroom and shot himself.”
I’d been talking to him for half-an-hour. He was keen to go to a talk at the Austrian Cultural Forum in Knightsbridge. “It’s difficult to keep up with him,” said his friend Heather.
Acclaimed Yangs haunted by a tragedy
THE death this week in Beijing at 94 of a world distinguished poet and translator, Yang Xianyi, reminded me of a story involving a small corner shop in Camden Town.
Yang had been sent by his Mandarin family to read classics at Oxford in the mid-30s. At one time, while active in the movement among Chinese students against the Japanese invaders of China, Yang lived in Upper Park Road, Hamptead.
In the late 30s he returned to China with his wife, Gladys, also an Oxford student, and welcomed the Chinese revolution in 1949.
For years he became established as a translator, mainly of Chinese classical literature. But in the Cultural Revolution he was branded a “capitalist roader” before being jailed as a British spy in 1969 along with his wife.
It was after their release in the early 70s that the Yangs had to cope with a mentally disturbed son, in his 20s, who refused to recognise the Yangs as his parents and was only willing to speak English.
Sent to London for psychiatric treatment, his son lived for some time with a friend of the family, writer Felix Greene, a relative of the novelist Graham Greene, and later with his aunt in Hendon.
A friend found a job for him as an assistant in a Camden Town shop where all went well until he got into an argument with a colleague, an Irishman, who lambasted the British for their “colonial” rule in Northern Ireland.
Yang’s son couldn’t stand the British being criticised.
To him, an Englishman stood for all that was the best in the world. So he walked out of the job, and later committed suicide, blowing himself up in a fire.
However much the Yangs got on with their lives in Beijing, charming to the world, acclaimed by academics, awarded honorary doctorates, they never really got over this personal tragedy.
Taking the pee at Commons
OUR MP Frank Dobson has always been known for his belly laugh laced with expletives.
He has a quality all politicians should possess – a love of the arts and a rich seam of laughter. I assume that’s why the chief Labour whip in the Commons decided to allow him to make the Humble Address following the Queen’s speech.
He said he was pleased St Pancras International was “a great success” because he was the first to suggest it should become a high-speed link.
He then described how he helped to unveil a plaque to Carry On star Kenneth Williams. Following a burst of applause, the curtains of a window in Marchmont Street, Bloomsbury, were parted by a man woken from his Sunday lie-in – the puzzled man was “stark naked”.
He covered more serious subjects of course – how the HQ of the African National Congress was based in Camden, how the famous Labour leader Nye Bevan lived with Jenny Lee in Guilford Street. But he made me smile in describing how his predecessor Lena Jeger once canvassed a top flat in a council block in Camden Town.
She launched into a great left-wing issue of the day, German Rearmament, and then stopped for breath. The woman at the door asked whether she came up in the lift. “Yes, stinks of pee, doesn’t it,” said the woman. “Can’t you stop ‘em peeing in the lift?”
Lena replied: “I don’t think I can.”
“Well”, said the woman “if you can’t stop ’em peeing in our lift, how can you expect me to believe you can stop the Germans rearming?”
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