Wolfgang Suschitzky, the photographer, who has died aged 104, was best known for his atmospheric stills of pre-war London, but he was also the imaginative cinematographer on Get Carter (1971), widely acclaimed as Britain's finest gangster film.
His naturalistic approach gave the film its brooding documentary feel, Suschitzky lighting the face of Michael Caine (starring as Jack Carter) in a cinema verite style to emphasise the cobra-lidded eyes and the cold, calculating nature of Caine's character.
Michael Caine starred in the 1971 gangster film Get Carter.
Known in the film trade as Su, Suschitzky, a native Viennese, worked in Europe as a stills photographer before the Second World War, fleeing to Britain in 1935 and rapidly making a name for himself with a remarkable series of photographs taken along a quarter-mile stretch of the Charing Cross Road in London.
When war came, Suschitzky joined the documentary movement, working with its distinguished principal exponent, Paul Rotha, on films such as World of Plenty (1943) as well as shooting numerous government information shorts. During the Blitz he chronicled the shattered topography of London, once clambering up the dome of St Paul's to photograph the bombed-out streets below.
Wolfgang Suschitzky was in demand as a photographer and cinematographer.Credit: Getty Images
His first feature film, also with Rotha, was No Resting Place (1951), about Irish tinkers. On this and subsequent films like Jack Clayton's The Bespoke Overcoat (1955), which won an Oscar for Best Short, Suschitzky earned a reputation as an expert location photographer with a documentary-maker's ability to extract atmosphere from naturalistic settings.
The son of a bookseller, Suschitzky was born in a working-class district of Vienna in 1912 into a non-observant Jewish family of active socialists, and never abandoned his left-leaning political views.
His first love was zoology, and although he forsook it to take a degree in photography, he continued to take great delight in photographing animals.
After training as a studio assistant at the Institute for Graphical Research in Vienna, the course of his life changed when Austrian fascists under Engelbert Dollfuss took over the government in 1934.
In 1940 he staged his first exhibition (of animal photographs) in London and published a guide to photographing children. The following year he published Photographing Animals and his talent for animal photography can be seen in his pictures for Julian Huxley's book, The Kingdom of the Beasts (1956), and his cinematography in Ring of Bright Water (1969), the story of a man living with his pet otter on the Scottish coast.
From the late 1960s he was increasingly in demand as a features director of photography, although he never abandoned his non-fiction origins, and was still shooting industrial training films as late as the 1980s.
His work is to be found in the photographic collections of the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum.
His sister married Alex Tudor-Hart, a British doctor and Cambridge contemporary of Kim Philby's. As Edith Tudor-Hart she became an important documentary photographer in the 1950s and her images of London slums and miners in Wales bore some similarities to her brother's work.
During the war Suschitzky married Ilona Donath, with whom he had three children. One of them, Peter, worked as a cinematographer on The Rocky Horror Picture Show, The Empire Strikes Back and several films directed by David Cronenberg. Another is the musician and writer Misha Donat.
Suschitzky is survived by his partner, Heather Anthony, and by two sons and a daughter from his marriage to Donath.
Telegraph, London