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The Camera Helps: A Definitive Retrospective of the Work of Paddy Summerfield
11 October 2025 to 30 November 2025
About The Camera Helps: A Definitive Retrospective of the Work of Paddy Summerfield
Paddy Summerfield (1947–2024) was a photographer who developed a new psychological vision of photography, turning the camera on the innermost workings of the human mind and heart.
Despite an ongoing battle with bipolar disorder, leading the photographer to continue living with his parents in Oxford, Summerfield rose to prominence in the 1980s. Later, his five critically acclaimed publications depicted Summerfield’s most intense and enduring photographic obsessions: desire and alienation.
This substantial retrospective of the photographer’s work shows the stages of Summerfield’s creative evolution through comprehensive installations inspired by his five major publications as well as other significant bodies of work.
Highlights on display include:
- The Oxford Pictures 1968-78, a series capturing 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.
- Tony Lights Up (2016), an unpublished short photo-essay and portrait of ‘Tony’, a familiar figure at the time to local people, living in sheltered accommodation. Summerfield accompanied Tony on his daily routine of asking for small change, laughing at the world around him, and betting on dogs – portraying his pleasure in the quiet satisfaction of lighting a cigarette.
- Mother and Father (Dewi Lewis 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.
The exhibition also offers a glimpse of both the physicality and mastery of Summerfield’s unique and idiosyncratic relationship with the craft of photographic print making.
This exhibition is part of Photo Oxford.
A small display – Paddy Summerfield: Order out of chaos – will be open from the end of August until 30 November in Blackwall Hall. It previews Summerfield’s working process and serves as a forerunner to the full exhibition.
Tickets
Please see important booking information below.
Booking information
Ticket prices:
Free admission, no ticket required
Dates & times:
Saturday 11 October to Sunday 30 November 2025
Monday to Saturday from 10.00am to 5.00pm
Sunday from 11.00am to 4.00pm
Location:
Blackwell Hall, Weston Library