Wolfgang Suschitzky

Bosa, Giovanni Stonecutters. Photograph by Wolfgang Suschitzky, 1948

The photographer Wolfgang Suschitzky was born in 1912 in Vienna, to a Jewish family. His father, a progressive publisher and an authoritative socialist exponent, created the first socialist bookstore in 1901.
Leaving Vienna in the early thirties, after a short period in Holland, in 1935 he settled in London where he embarked on a career as a film operator and photographer, soon becoming known for the series of images on Charing Cross Road. Equally famous are the portraits of important writers, politicians and scientists and some of his animal photos, as well as a series about children. As a film operator, he has worked for Paul Rotha Productions, NBC, New York, and other producers, making about 100 documentaries and numerous fictional films for big cinema.
His images, present in the main English photo galleries, are preserved, among others, in the Archives of the city of Amsterdam, in the Haags Gemeentemuseum in The Hague and at the Texas University in Austin.
Wolf Suschitzky was also the operator of two films made on the occasion of the antimalarial campaign “The Sardinian Project” (1948) and “Adventure in Sardinia” (1950), currently being acquired by the ISRE, which instead already owns the Fund consisting of the entire body of photographs - about 1,000 - taken in Sardinia in 1948 and 1950. About 500 images concern the campaign for the eradication of malaria conducted in Sardinia by ERLAAS at the end of the forties and funded, among others, by the Rockfeller Foundation, while the remaining part relates to places and people from different areas of Sardinia, from Cagliari to Dorgali, from Oristano to Olbia, created by the photographer of his own choice.