ULTING, ESSEX, UK.- Artist Humphrey Spender, 94, died. In the decade from 1932 to 1942, Humphrey Spender (b. 1910) produced a body of powerful and poignant photographs that played an important role in the development of British documentary and photojournalism. Working for the new illustrated weekly magazine Picture Post and Mass-Observation, a project to survey British culture and society, Spender created photographs that embody with lucidity, detail, and breadth an entire complex of social relations in Depression and wartime Britain. His merging of individual drama with an evolving social consciousness finds parallels in the prose and poetry of Humphrey's older brother Stephen Spender and others in the circle of W. H. Auden.

Humphrey Spender began his career as a professional photojournalist providing images of a pastoral England for the Daily Mirror, while concentrating his creative and intellectual energies on the more challenging subject matter of Britain's large industrial cities. His photographs of unemployment and poverty in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Jarrow, and Stepney, published in the Listener (1934) and the Left Review (1936), were critical in the early rise of the British documentary movement.

Spender's growing commitment to the sociological study of the British people led to his involvement with Mass-Observation, for which he was the photographer in the years 1937-38, capturing significant moments in the flow of life in pubs, parks, markets, factories, offices, and locker rooms. At the same time he became a photojournalist for Picture Post. In photo stories on conditions in Britain's industrial cities and on servicemen and civilians coping with the war, Spender deepened and refined his art as a photographer as well as his understanding as an observer of human relations.

Overcome by aesthetic and ethical concerns about the nature of photojournalism, Spender virtually stopped taking photographs early in the war. From 1942 he worked in photo-interpretation in the British Intelligence Service. After the war he devoted himself to painting and textile design.