Paddy Summerfield


Paddy Summerfield is a British photographer who has lived and worked in Oxford in the UK all his life.
Summerfield is known for his "evocative series of black and white images, shot on 35mm film, which co-opt the traditional genre of documentary photography to realise a more personal and inward looking vision." He has said his photographs are exclusively about abandonment and loss.

Life and career

After taking an Art Foundation course at the Oxford Polytechnic, Summerfield attended Guildford School of Art, studying firstly in the Photography Department, then joining the Film department the following year. In 1967, when still a first-year student, he made photographs that appeared in 1970 in Bill Jay's magazine Album. Between 1968 and 1978, Summerfield documented Oxford University students in the summer terms. His pictures published in Creative Camera, and on its cover in January 1974, were recognised as psychological and expressionist, unusual in an era of journalistic and documentary photography. Throughout his life, Summerfield has focused on making photographic essays that are personal documents. From 1997 to 2007 he photographed his parents, his mother with Alzheimer's disease and his father caring for her.
Like It Is was Summerfield's first London exhibition, a group show in Dixon's Photographic Gallery, Oxford Street, in 1967. Since then, his work has been exhibited at other London venues, including the ICA Gallery, the Serpentine Gallery, the Barbican, and The Photographers' Gallery in its Newport Street home. In 1976, When Nicholas Serota was director of the Museum of Modern Art, Oxford, he offered Summerfield the opportunity to exhibit Beneath the Dreaming Spires, his first one-man show, in 1976.
During his early career, he was awarded several Arts Council grants.

Publications

Books by Summerfield

Solo exhibitions