MAYER WAKEFIELD applauds Rosamund Pike’s punchy and tragic portrayal of a multi-tasking mother and high court judge
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A welcome ‘rediscovery’
A new exhibition in Oxford restores the reputation of HELEN MUSPRATT as one of the 20th century's great radical photographers, says John Green
(L to R) Busking Miner (unemployed young Welshman met busking on the jetty) 1930; John Cornford & Ray Peters, 1934
[Helen Muspratt] 
FIONA O CONNOR recommends an unflinching depiction of child sexual abuse and its aftershocks, set in a working-class Liverpool family
New releases from Paul Weller, Wet Leg, and Dino Saluzzi
PAUL DONOVAN relishes the spectacle of a 1950s detective in pursuit of a 500-year-old murder mystery
MARIA DUARTE recommends the intricate study of a high-performance and highly dysfuntional German family
GUILLERMO THOMAS is intrigued by a history of the Middle East that demonstrates how promising post colonial beginnings were snuffed out by Western imperialist interests
Helen Muspratt Photographer
Bodleian Library, Oxford
HELEN MUSPRATT was a noted photographer who came to prominence during the inter-war years yet, like so many women artists, her life and work had been largely ignored before being recently “rediscovered.”
Muspratt decided to make a career for herself in photography early in life. After completing a photographic course at the Regent Street Polytechnic, and still in her early twenties, she began working as a receptionist for the fashionable Mayfair photographic studio of Donald Donovan.
In 1928, full of confidence, she set up her own studio in the High Street in Swanage where her parents lived. Here she utilised her newly developed skills as a portrait photographer to establish a flourishing business.
Although her bread-and-butter remained straightforward portraiture, for her own pleasure she experimented with lighting and other technical processes. After coming across one of Man Ray’s solarised photographs in a magazine, she began experimenting with this technique and others, including rayographs and multiple exposures.
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