Humphrey Spender, born in 1910, emerged in the ’30s as an unpretentious scrutinizer of great intellect and humor, equipped with an alert eye and a profound understanding of his medium, photography, and of the genre of photojournalism. Like many artists and writers of his generation and elevated social class, Spender underwent a kind of intellectual confrontation with the rest of the world, a sudden and dramatic recognition of the narrowness of his own milieu. (Christopher Isherwood’s own such confrontation resulted in his 1939 novel Goodbye to Berlin, the first edition of which reproduced a