Penny Tweedie

Penelope "Penny" Anne Tweedie (30 April 1940 – 14 January 2011) was an English photojournalist who is noted for her work with the Aboriginal peoples in Arnhem Land in the late 1970s.

Born into a farming family she went to the Guildford School of Art in spite of her parents’ opposition.

Penelope Anne Tweedie was born on 30 April 1940 at the Fowlers nursing home in Hawkhurst in Kent.

She was the oldest of three children and the sole daughter to the farmer John Lawrence Tweedie, who was serving as an aircraftman in the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve, and his first wife Anne Ellinor née Wilson.

At the time of the registration of Tweedie's birth, Anne was living in Tuckness with her parents.

Tweedie was educated at Benenden School.

She wanted to become a photographer as she was impressed by the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson but her parents voiced their opposition to her career choice but nevertheless went to Guildford School of Art to study the subject from 1958 to 1961.

By the late 1960s Tweedie became known as a "swinging London’" photographer as she was seen walking a black Pekingese dog and drove a MGB convertible.

She set herself further assignments and this was funded by cover portraits of celebrities for the Radio Times and the Reader's Digest magazines and technically demanding work including the Embassy cigarettes gift catalogue.

Tweedie's work for charities and non-governmental organisations were always subsidised and helped advertising agencies and catalogues.

Tweedie's first job came with Queen in 1961 after it asked her college to send their best performing student to them.

She left two years later to go freelance and set herself assignments in which she covered various newsworthy stories.

Upon graduating from art school, Tweedie found employment at Queen in 1961, a magazine covering London's young smart set, after it asked the Guildford School of Art to send their best performing student to them.

Among her subjects during this time was about the painter David Hockney while he was in his final year at the Royal College of Art.

The Telegraph magazine discovered in one edition that Tweedie had taken almost all the photos in that week's edition and bylined the story under the pseudonym "Wendy Patien" to avoid being embarrassed.

She left Queen after two years to go freelance.

Tweedie set her own assignments which concerned topics such as homelessness, teenage pregnancy and alcoholism.

She eventually was able to sell her photographs in Fleet Street.

Tweedie's breakthrough came in 1966 when she worked in an unpaid job with the charity Shelter and her photographs were used in the media.

Her first acclaimed work was her black-and-white photographs of Glasgow's poor quality post-war housing conditions.

She was offered employment at the Daily Express but this was later withdrawn when its National Union of Journalists chapel father declared that a woman being sent to the scene of a rail accident or something similar would not be possible as it was feared she would faint.

She also covered the Paris student riots in 1968 and photographed the singer Bob Dylan at the Isle of Wight Festival 1969.

She and others travelled to East Bengal during the 1971 East Pakistan crisis but were arrested by the Indian Army after they were mistaken for spies.

Tweedie was embroiled in controversy when she refused to photograph prisoners accused to being collaborators when she noticed they were to be bayoneted to death for the assembled foreign media.

Tweedie was denied commissions to cover the 1971 East Pakistan crisis and photographed Air India's in-flight meals at Heathrow Airport in order to obtain a ticket to Calutta (now Kolkata).

She was contacted by The Sunday Times after the newspaper used a photograph of hers on one of its front pages.

Tweedie and several colleagues travelled into East Bengal by rickshaw when India declared war on Pakistan.

The group was arrested by the Indian Army who mistaken them for spies.

They were imprisoned in a gaol and Tweedie was isolated in the women's section.

Upon being released, she borrowed cameras and took photographs of the plight of refugees and the bodies of Bengali intellectuals being massacred by the retreating Pakistani forces.

While attending a victory celebration at the end of the war held outside Dhaka, Tweedie noticed a group of prisoners accused of being collaborators were going to be bayoneted to death, primarily for the benefit of the assembled foreign press.

She and other press workers refused to photograph the event.

The following day, The Sunday Times cancelled Tweedie's contract, and despite not regretting her decision, the controversy followed her over the coming years.

She was one of the journalists expelled from Uganda by its president Idi Amin in 1972 during his deportation of Asians.

The next year, Tweedie was shot at by planes as an Israeli soldier sheltered her under a tank in a minefield.

She successfully smuggled photographs past Israel's strict censorship rules to The Observer.

Tweedie later worked in Beirut, and in the aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami, she lived amongst the guerrillas in East Timor and began a friendship with the country's future president Xanana Gusmão.

She was asked by the BBC to photograph the filming of a programme called Explorers: The Story of Burke and Wills in Alice Springs in 1975 and later became fascinated by the lives and work of the Aboriginal people.

Her work was widely exhibited and she won the Walkley Award for photojournalism in 1999.

Tweedie regularly returned to the United Kingdom and continued to be kept busy until she took her own life in early 2011.