Photo Oxford, Oxford’s biennial photo festival, returns this month (25 October-16 November 2025) with a packed programme of 30 exhibitions and events, three of which celebrate the life and work of Oxford photographer Paddy Summerfield (1947-2024). Best known for his evocative series of black and white images shot on 35mm film, Summerfield inverted the traditional genre of documentary photography to present a more psychological and personal version of life.
“Paddy was the most photographic person I have ever known. It was as impossible to distinguish the man from the medium as it is, sometimes, to discern the sea from the sky on a blue day, when both seem to merge into one,” Alex Scheidman.
The Camera Helps: a definitive retrospective of the work of Paddy Summerfield will be held in the Blackwell Hall in the Weston Library. Curated by Alex Schneideman and Patricia Baker-Cassidy, it will show the stages of Summerfield’s creative evolution and offer a glimpse of his unique and idiosyncratic relationship with the craft of photographic print making. The Beginning of Eternity at Rona Painting Gallery in Jericho will be showing some of Summerfield’s final images alongside some of his very first published colour work.
In a third show, Sacred Spaces, held in the Oxford home in which Summerfield initiated photography gatherings, seven artists from these gatherings present their own work as they celebrate Paddy’s support for and influence upon their individual visions.
“We reveal our different personal truths by the way we turn the camera on our shared world.”
For more information on these and the other free exhibitions and affordable events taking place as part of Photo Oxford visit photooxford.org.
Image by Paddy Summerfield from Oxford Pictures
