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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 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 opened last night (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.
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