Bert Hardy
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Bert Hardy (1913, London—1995) was a British documentary and press photographer.
He rose from humble working class origins to work first for the General Photographic Agency, then to found his own freelance firm Criterion. In 1941 Criterion was absorbed into the leading picture publication of the 1930s and 1940s, Picture Post. Hardy was self-taught and used a Leica - unconventional for press photographers at that time - but went on to become the Post's Chief Photographer.
Hardy served as a war photographer in the Royal Army Photographic Unit from 1942 until 1946: he took part in the D-Day landings in June 1944; covered the liberation of Paris; the allied advance across the Rhine; and was one of the first photographers to enter a liberated Nazi concentration camp to record the suffering there. Near the end of WWII, he went to Asia, where he became Lord Mountbatten's personal photographer. He later went on the cover the Korean War for Picture Post, reporting on United Nations atrocities at Pusan in 1950 and on that war's turning point, the Battle of Inchon, for which he won the Missouri Pictures of the Year Award.
Three of Hardy's photos were used in Edward Steichen's famous "Family of Man" exhibition and book, though not his favorite photo, which shows two Gorbals (in Glasgow) street urchins off on a lark. Hardy himself was photographed many times, including in war-time; but three very good photo-portraits of him are currently in the Photographs Collection of the British National Portrait Gallery.
Having written an article for amateur photographers suggesting you didn't need an expensive camera to take good pictures, Hardy staged a carefully posed photograph of two young women sitting on railings above a breezy Blackpool promenade using a Box Brownie [1]
After leaving Picture Post Hardy became one of the most successful advertising photographers of the 1960s. A memorial plaque honoring him is in the Church of Journalists, St. Bride's, Fleet Street, London.
[edit] Books
- Bert Hardy. Down the Bay: Picture Post, Humanist Photography and Images of 1950s Cardiff (2003)
- Bert Hardy. Bert Hardy: My Life (The Gordon Fraser Gallery Ltd, London, 1985)68.187.113.118 04:03, 9 April 2007 (UTC)
