First retrospective of visionary photographer Paddy Summerfield to open to the public

The Camera Helps

Preview display from 23 August 2025
Full exhibition: 11 October - 30 November 2025
Weston Library, Bodleian Libraries, Oxford
 

The Bodleian Libraries will present The Camera Helps, the first retrospective of the photographic works of Paddy Summerfield, opening in Blackwell Hall from 11 October - 30 November 2025.

Paddy Summerfield, the visionary British social documentary photographer, rose to prominence in the early 1970s with original and deeply psychological studies of himself, his family, and the world around him. Summerfield died in 2024, leaving behind a substantial body of work, which the Bodleian acquired between 2023 and 2024. Curated by Summerfield’s wife and collaborator, Patricia Baker-Cassidy, and friend, photographer and printer, Alex Schneideman, the exhibition brings together all of his published works, as well as significant unpublished material, offering viewers a rare opportunity to explore his distinctive photographic approach in depth for the first time.

Much of Summerfield’s work dealt with themes of loneliness, detachment, desire and the inner life. Notable series on display include Mother and Father (Dewi Publishing, 2014), a moving and poignant journal of the final years of his parents’ sixty-year marriage. From 1997 to 2007, Summerfield documented his mother’s worsening Alzheimer’s and his father’s unceasing dedication to caring for her. As he wrote, “I recorded my mother’s loss of the world, my father's loss of his wife, and eventually my loss of both of them.” Considered one of his most significant and influential works, it has been cited by many of today’s leading documentary photographers. Pictures of the Garden (Dewi Publishing, 2023) featured responses to this work from seven prominent photographers, including Vanessa Winship, Siân Davey, Alys Tomlinson, and Alex Schneideman.

Summerfield’s deep connection to the city of Oxford shaped his life and work, having lived in the same Summertown home from the age of two until his death. Another series on display, The Oxford Pictures 1968—78, captures students during the summer term at Oxford. Close in age but feeling like an outsider, Summerfield found a shared sense of loneliness in his subjects. Though set beside rivers, college lawns, and Oxford streets, the images evoke the insecurities of youth, including longing, isolation, and sexual anxiety, with solitary figures reflecting his own experience.

Unpublished works on display for the first time include Tony Lights Up (2016), a short photo-essay and portrait of ‘Tony’, a familiar figure at the time to locals, living in sheltered accommodation. The series follows his daily routine — asking for small change, laughing at the world around him, and betting on dogs — culminating in the quiet satisfaction of lighting a cigarette. Also on display is Handheld, a series presenting found objects collected from streets, junk shops, and nature that reflect traces of human lives and personal heroes. Handheld will be displayed alongside the original objects it portrays.

The exhibition pays homage to the creative partnership between Summerfield and his wife, curator and writer Patricia Baker-Cassidy. An interview with Barker-Cassidy will form part of the display, reflecting the many ways she helped shape, edit, and present his work, playing a central role in bringing his work to a wider audience.

Co-curator, photographer and printer Alex Schneideman, says:

Paddy’s work is significant because he has influenced a generation of photographers whose work is concerned with family and the emotional space between the individual and the world. His work is really about his own psychology. It was impossible to know
where Paddy ended and photography began.

The exhibition also sheds light on Summerfield’s approach to printing in the darkroom. Unlike many photographers, he was unconcerned with editions or archival perfection — what mattered most was the creative process itself. When he was younger, once he had selected the particular negatives that expressed his vision, he often threw away the rest of the film. Despite his informal methods, he was exacting in his exposures and final prints, with a clear sense of when a print had succeeded or failed. The curators have produced new prints which offer insight into the breadth of his creative practice.

Between 2023 and 2024, the Bodleian Libraries acquired Paddy Summerfield’s archive in recognition of his remarkable artistic legacy, emotional poignancy, and contribution to the medium of photography. Selected material will be catalogued and made available online to coincide with the exhibition, with the full archive to be catalogued after the display and opened for research, learning and future engagement.

Richard Ovenden, Bodley’s Librarian and the Helen Hamlyn Director of the University Libraries, says:

Paddy Summerfield was one of the most important British photographers of the last fifty years. Although his work only came to prominence in more recent years, he influenced many younger photographers with his deeply personal view of the world around him. His practice was centred around his life in Oxford, and it is fitting that the Bodleian Libraries should now house his archive for study and research, and help share his work with a wider public.

A preview display, ‘Order out of Chaos’, focusing on Summerfield’s working process, will open in Blackwell Hall at the Weston Library on 23 August 2025, ahead of the full display, which runs from 11 October — 30 November 2025. Timed to coincide with Photo Oxford 2025, the city’s biennial photography festival, the exhibition forms part of this year’s festival theme, Truth.