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.
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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.