Worswick, Clark 1940-

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WORSWICK, Clark 1940-

PERSONAL: Born September 16, 1940, in Berkeley, CA; son of Wallace Burdette and Elizabeth (Benedict) Worswick; married Joan Mitchell (a teacher), September 19, 1970; children: Lucia, Nicholas. Education: Attended Visva Bharati, 1959, and Harvard University, 1966-70.

ADDRESSES: Home and office—Oak Summit Rd., Millbrook, NY 12545.

CAREER: Film director, 1960-86; Asia Society Gallery, guest director, beginning 1975; Japan Society Gallery, guest director, 1978-79; photographic historian and writer.

AWARDS, HONORS: Indo-American fellowship, Smithsonian Institution, 1979.

WRITINGS:

The Last Empire: Photographs of British India, Aperture (Millerton, NY), 1976.

Imperial China: Photographs 1850-1911, Crown (New York, NY), 1978.

An Edwardian Observer, Crown (New York, NY), 1978.

Japan: Photographs, 1854-1904, Knopf (New York, NY), 1979.

Princely India, Knopf (New York, NY), 1980.

The Camera and the Tribe, Knopf (New York, NY), 1982.

(With Belinda Rathbone) Walker Evans: The Lost Work, Arena Editions (Santa Fe, NM), 2000.

(Author of text) Berenice Abbott and Eugène Atget (photographs), Arena Editions (Santa Fe, NM), 2002.

FILM SCRIPTS

Family Honor, Cinerama/Abc Films, 1973.

(With Louis Pastore) Agent on Ice, Shapiro Entertainment, 1985.

Also author of feature film strips The Second Raven, and A.N.T., both 1986, and documentary film strips Changing Rains, 1965, California, 1968, and Kotah, 1970.

SIDELIGHTS: Clark Worswick once commented: "When I was eighteen I went to India to university. At a certain moment in time I calculated that I had traveled 70,000 miles on Indian third-class trains—some sort of grotesque record, seeing the 'remains' of British India, archaeological sites, and tribal groups. Living in the Salvation Army hostels and the ashrams of the Maha Bodi society during the period I stayed in India affected me most as an artist; it was the last moment the 'white man' was held in (almost) universal esteem in Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. From the time I was eighteen until I was twenty-eight, over a ten-year period, I traveled more or less constantly in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. I supported myself by doing freelance photography and films.

"Somewhere along the way I discovered the work of nineteenth-century photographers working in the same areas I was working in, and I brought together a collection of work done in India during the nineteenth century that resulted in an exhibition and a book, The Last Empire: Photographs of British India. It has always amazed me that photography managed, at the penultimate moment in Asia and the Middle East, to document the way traditional cultures were before they were radically, irrevocably changed by the onslaught of the European industrial revolution. This change has been so complete that at this moment Tehran is very similar to Tokyo in looks, Bombay looks like Rio, et cetera."