Most women of her age and status would have gone to work in the mills or domestic service but Longstaff managed to get an apprenticeship at Westerman’s photography studio in Hebden Bridge.
“People who knew her say she was a real force of nature,” said Andrew McTominey, the heritage manager of the Hebden Bridge-based charity Pennine Heritage, which holds Longstaff’s archive.
She was a working-class woman who took amazing photographs for 70 years, yet she is little known precisely because, some would argue, she was a working-class woman.
In the late 1930s, she bought a cutting-edge Rolleiflex camera, like that used by the American photographer Lee Miller, this year portrayed by Kate Winslet in the film Lee.
Vast collection of negatives shed light on working-class pioneer little known outside West Yorkshire town.
