PROFILE: Paddy Summerfield

by Sarah Mayhew Craddock

Charming, quick-witted, intellectually acute, with piercing blue eyes, the 68 year old Oxford-based fine art photographer Paddy Summerfield is enticingly enigmatic and has an infectious boyish energy.

Summerfield has spent almost 50 years working with a 35mm camera and black and white film, producing photographic essays and documenting street life. His work has featured in leading fine art publications and is exhibited in major galleries the length and breadth of the country from London’s Serpentine Gallery, the ICA, and the Barbican, to the Museum Of Film & Photography in Bradford, the Cambridge Darkroom, and closer to home, Modern Art Oxford, to name but a few.

Born in Derby, Summerfield’s family moved to a house on the Banbury Road when he was two years old where he lived in a happy, culturally rich home that resounded in classical music and shelves full of literature. Summerfield had a sister who died at the age of five from a seizure when he was eight months old, when his life changed for ever, his parents becoming understandably overprotective from then on.

"My father always said the few months when there was Felicity AND baby Paddy was the happiest time of his life," Paddy remembers. "Because of grief, my mother became withdrawn and could not really bond with me. I think that has affected me all my life, and shaped my photography."

Summerfield’s father worked as the County Surveyor of Oxfordshire and was responsible for the M40 cut through the Chilterns, his mother and his grandmother shared an interest in antique collecting and the subtleties of aesthetic balance that Summerfield has clearly inherited.

Commenting on early experimentations in photography Summerfield said: "From the very beginning I always insisted on taking the family photo with a brownie box tin camera. I knew, even before I was ten, that I wanted to take pictures. When at school, aged about 14, I was awarded the photographic prize. I would go off on my bicycle with a camera to take pictures. I knew from an early age that this was what I wanted to do and that I had a talent. I wanted to make little designs, see the world in an ordered way.”

Summerfield went to his local primary school, Sunnymead, until he was nine years old before progressing to boarding school in Surrey where he remained until he was 13, a very unhappy period in his life, his dyslexia largely undiagnosed: “I hated it. I was lost, unhappy, and struggled with understanding. It was very painful. My next school in Berkshire however was a big turnaround, probably only 100 boys, about 10 members of staff, lovely grounds. They saw through me, took an interest.”

Returning to Oxford, Summerfield went on Oxford Polytechnic, now Oxford Brookes University, where he did a Foundation Course in Art and Design before going on to do further studies in photography at Guildford School of Art, now University for the Creative Arts. At the time, Guildford was reputed to be the most progressive, interesting school of photography in the country. However, Summerfield had already established a leaning towards Fine Art Photography and felt at odds with the push towards commercial photography at Guildford. He recalled,

“I managed to get thrown out twice, and it wasn’t for riding motor-bicycles up and down the corridors or for taking drugs, or anything really interesting. It was just for my vision. I was influencing people, being quite creative. Our second photographic project was an egg. Most people photographed the egg in an egg cup in a studio, and I put it in someone’s armpit.”

Captivated from a young age by the inevitability of a decisive moment, Summerfield would drink in the work of the masters of candid and street photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Jacques-Henri Lartigue whose work, alongside the French Impressionists, has clearly influenced his own.

Summerfield was also keen to learn filmmaking, but his tutors responded by saying: “We’ll let you in, but put your ideas away.” and when he didn’t, "they got rid of me.”

Luckily Summerfield was: "confident enough in my own vision. Sometimes when you know there’s an injustice there’s no point pointing a finger. They weren’t creative enough, they weren’t ready. The course was taught by people in the commercial world – advertising.”

By this time Summerfield’s work, work that he had made at art school in Guildford, had been published in several leading photography journals.

Returning to the family home in Oxford, Summerfield was aided by his parents who gave him the freedom and support to continue making his own work. "They could see I wasn't making money, so they supported their boy. They made my creativity possible for me,” he recounts gratefully.

Keen to get a move on in photography, the young artist supported his practice with several part-time jobs ranging from commercial photographic contracts to being a milkman and running coffee bars.

So how would he describe his passion? “If you frame something, and see the potential, the right lighting, something could occur, you’re looking through the viewfinder - then magically something comes about. You press the shutter, and your heart skips! They say salmon fishing is better than sex. It’s the battle and the excitement. Like scoring a goal – that great shot of adrenaline.

“In a way photography gives you some value. There’s a great urgency to make good pictures, but of course good pictures don’t often come. Like a painter you might get 15 a year."

Describing his approach to his oeuvre as “collecting images, gathering corners of the world and making them into pictures. It’s a lifetime obsession, you never stop thinking and looking. Photography ruins your life, because all you’re looking out for is pictures, things that make pictures, so the rest of your life goes by, you don’t notice anything else."

He expanded: “My visual philosophy is about failure, back views, rejection, decapitation, dehumanising, not really being functional, having no kind of place or acceptance in the world.”

On a personal level, Summerfield became a father to Lucy when he was aged 30 but has never married. He now lives with his partner, Patricia Baker-Cassidy, in his family home in Oxford. Patricia owned and directed Art Jericho gallery when they first met – though it wasn’t until Baker-Cassidy saw Summerfield’s photographic essay The Oxford Pictures (part of Jeremy Mogford’s private art collection) in The Old Bank Hotel that he really caught Baker-Cassidy’s attention.

In almost half a decade of making pictures, most of them within a two mile radius of his home, Summerfield has created a vast catalogue of stunning photo essays that he is now in the process of ordering. Appearing like film stills in their own right Summerfield’s photography is thought-provoking, at times melancholy, deeply touching - a timeless visual exploration of various psychological states, Oxford therefore a fitting base. "I love Oxford from an architectural perspective, being surrounded by privilege, academic life, success that is waiting to happen, and contrastingly, the less privileged and more ordinary life on the street," he expanded.

Sat in a room filled with mountains of negatives Summerfield adds that he is currently putting the finishing touches to his second book, The Oxford Pictures, which will be published in April by Dewi Lewis, and available at Blackwells.

So how does he feel looking back at such an illustrious career? "I don't look back.When something is finished it's way behind me. I am still looking, struggling, searching, hoping." An unfinished book then.

www. paddysummerfield.co.uk