Alex Schneideman writes... My friend Paddy Summerfield, who has died, was broadly considered Oxford’s greatest photographer since Henry Fox Talbot. Summerfield, a child imbued from infancy in Oxford’s history and art was raised in the same house in Summertown from the age of two until he died.
Having studied at Guildford School of Art (not without controversy) Summerfield became known as a photographer in the 1980s but it was not until the publication by Dewi Lewis in 2014 of his seminal work, Mother and Father that he came to the forefront of British documentary photography.
The photobook depicts Summerfield's parents in the garden of their north Oxford home as they tended to the lawn and plants and to each other. As the book progresses we watch as his father increasingly cares for his mother, her eventual disappearance and then the loss of his father too. In most of the photographs the parents’ faces are turned away from the
photographer-son. Summerfields images were typified by a certain spirituality and he maintained that his work had always been about “abandonment and loss” as his parents had turned their attention inward following the tragic early death of his older sister when Summerfield was two years old. However he insisted that ‘Mother and Father’ stood as a durational “love letter” to them both.
Summerfield’s first major publication was important because it established his groundbreaking use of a unique and emotional photographic ‘perspective’. His work would become representative of what became known as the ‘psychological perspective’ - in which Summerfield’s compositions place the viewer in the emotional apex of the scene, blurring the boundaries between the subject, the photographer and the viewer.
Several more books were to follow including The Oxford Pictures (2016), Empty Days (2018), The Holiday Pictures (2019) and Home Movie (2021). Each subsequent title added to Summerfield’s reputation as one of the most important contemporary British documentary photographers.
Summerfield’s photography was typically black and white but in his final years he worked mainly in colour using an old ‘flip phone’ to photograph the garden and the people who
surrounded him. Some of these were published in his final book, The Beginnings of Eternity (2023).
In 2019 Summerfield married his partner, Patricia Baker-Cassidy, who by this time had become his de-facto producer. Baker-Cassidy brought order to the chaos of Paddy’s now notorious bins of thousands of negatives that he had accumulated over decades. A visitor to the Summerfield home would often find Paddy ensconced in writing, reading or discussion with friends and photographers while Baker-Cassidy worked diligently with a film scanner, as together they put together numerous maquettes for planned new publications.
The well respected Oxford Photography Group was often hosted by Summerfield and Baker-Cassidy at his home. He supported the group and worked closely with individual photographers, many of whom went on to be published, exhibited and collected.
Almost ten years after the publication of Mother and Father a new body of work was made by a group of photographers (including Alex Schneideman, Vanessa Winship, Sian Davey, Matthew Finn, Alys Tomlinson, Nik Roche and Jem Southam) who wanted to preserve the garden where Mother and Father had taken form and and to pay homage to Summerfield’s work. The resulting images were published as ‘Pictures from the Garden’ (as ever by Dewi Lewis) and an exhibition was staged in Oxford supported by The Photographers Gallery.
Summerfield’s work was supported by curators, academics and other photographers such as Richard Ovenden, Nicholas Serota and Martin Parr, Bill Jay and Peter Turner, then editor of Creative Camera. Summerfield’s own exhibition list is long and varied. He exhibited in solo group shows alongside such photographers as André Kertesz, Martin Parr, John Goto and Gerry Badger (who has written extensively about Summerfield’s work as well as providing texts for his publications). His work is held in national, international, private and institutional collections. It should be noted that Dewi Lewis’s sustained support of Paddy’s work brought it to the widest possible audience.
This year the Bodleian Library completed their acquisition of Summerfield’s extensive archive where plans are underway for a major exhibition in Autumn 2025.
It was a great honour for me to give Paddy what would sadly turn out to be his last solo show, The Holiday Pictures, at Flow Photographic Gallery in 2019. Sue Davis, the founder of The Photographers Gallery, then in failing health herself and accompanied by Zelda Cheatle made the trek from her home in Surrey to North West London to see the show - it was to be the last photography exhibition she would visit before her death some months later.
Paddy was the most photographic person I have ever known. It was as impossible to distinguish the man from the medium as it is sometimes to discern the sea from the sky on a blue day when both seem to merge into one.
Paddy leaves a daughter, Lucy and his wife Patricia.
Paddy Summerfield
18th February 1947 - 11th April 2024
Obituary by Alex Schneideman
London, April 2024
Image: (top) Alex Scheiderman, Paddy and Patricia; (lower two) Paddy Summerfield, from his Mother and Father series.
Comments
It is deeply saddening to learn of Paddy Summerfield's passing, tempered only slighly by the information that the Bodleian Library has acquired his archive and plans a major exhibiion, both richly deserved – although I am greatly suprized to know it was not unil 2014 that a first book of his work was published (kudos to Dewi for that and others). It is also heartwarming to learn of the dedication of his wife Patricia. I think he can be considered a fortunate man (and wonderful phoographer).