Edith Suschitzky was the daughter of the socialist Viennese bookseller Wilhelm Suschitzky and the sister of the photographer Wolf Suschitzky. She studied photography with Walter Peterhans (who was also the teacher of the émigré photographer Ellen Auerbach) at the Bauhaus Dessau from 1928. After marrying the doctor Alexander Tudor-Hart, she moved with him to England in 1933 for political reasons. Their son Tommy was born in 1936.
Edith Tudor-Hart maintained a variety of connections in the émigré scene: from 1937, she shared a photographic studio in Hampstead with the South African photographer Vera Elkin (Forbes 2013, 67). She was acquainted with the sculptor Anna Mahler and the architect Ernö Goldfinger, and maintained friendly relations with the photographer Lucia Moholy. Edith Tudor-Hart belonged to the social circle around the emigrated journalist Stefan Lorant, for whose magazines Lilliput and Picture Post she worked. Tudor-Hart also photographed for The Listener from 1933. She had been put in touch with the newspaper by Jack Pritchard, the founder of the architecture and furniture company Isokon.

Tudor-Hart was commissioned by Pritchard in the spring of 1934 to record the construction and opening of Lawn Road Flats, a modernist apartment block in Hampstead. Tudor-Hart’s photographs focus less on the modernist forms of the construction, but rather describe the teamwork involved in the building process, focusing on craftsmanship and labour-sharing. According to Jill Pearlman, Tudor-Hart used her connection with Pritchard in the context of her espionage activities for the Soviet Union and probably planted at least one resident Soviet spy in the building at all times. A boarding house with numerous residents and lively public traffic, as well as proximity to public transport, the building was ideal for spies who wanted to attract little attention (Pearlman 2013, 365–367).

In the photographic oeuvre of Edith Tudor-Hart, gender-specific perspectives overlap with an enduring interest in social structures, mechanisms of social exclusion and the lives of marginalised people, the socially deprived and working-class families. At the same time, her socially critical observations were closely linked to urban spaces. As early as 1931, even before she emigrated to England, Tudor-Hart photographed the hustle and bustle at the Caledonian Market in London and published the report under the heading “Der Markt des nackten Elends” [“The marketplace of stark misery”] in the Social Democratic magazine Der Kuckuck. In her photographs she shows weary vendors sitting in front of the wares they have spread out on the ground waiting for equally downtrodden buyers – a “trading place for the poorest among the poor”, a trading centre for the most wretched of the city’s inhabitants (Suschitzky 1931, 15; see also Holzer 2013, 43).
Even after her emigration, Edith Tudor-Hart continued these photographic observations in urban neighbourhoods, paying special attention to the living conditions of children and women. Tudor-Hart’s photos taken in the backyards of Gee Street in Finsbury/London are devoted to the precarious life of children, young adults and mothers. The series shows how natural the interaction of the photographer with her subjects was and how those she photographed allowed her to get close to them. Edith Tudor-Hart photographed with a medium format camera, a Rolleiflex, looking through the viewfinder from above; this made it easier for her to maintain direct contact with her subjects.

Tudor-Hart published her photographs in various contexts: A photo in the Gee Street series appeared in Wal Hannington’s book The Problem of the Distressed Areas, which was published in 1937 in a Left Book Club Edition by the publisher Victor Gollancz. The book devoted itself to the issues of the poor, underprivileged and unemployed more visible by directing attention to housing conditions, slums and impending political radicalisation. The same photograph from the backyards of Gee Street was published in the magazine Lilliput along with another photo by Tudor-Hart that shows a dog grooming salon where a bulldog is being groomed by two women. As paired images, the two photographs show the heedless vanities of one privileged lifestyle that existed side by side with abject poverty in the city.

Tudor-Hart’s special interest in gender-specific themes is reflected in her contributions to the book Working-Class Wives. Their Health and Conditions by the British social reformer Margery Spring Rice, which was distributed in 1939 as a bargain-priced Pelican Books paperback by Penguin Press, making it accessible to a wide readership. Spring Rice’s publication was based on a survey of 1,200 working-class women that looked at their state of health and government relief measures, which the book concluded to be unsatisfactory and in need of improvement. Tudor-Hart’s photographs of everyday situations emphasise the women’s individuality – especially in her close-up portraits – and the warmth and affection she found. At the same time, she does not shy away from what is wrong; rather, her photographs attribute autonomy and agency to the women and mothers in spite of (or precisely because of) their harsh living conditions.
In the 1950s, Tudor-Hart retired from photography and ran an antique shop in Brighton. After her death in 1973, her brother Wolf Suschitzky, who had also emigrated to London, took charge. of her negatives and endeavoured to ensure the survival of her photographic work.