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.
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.
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.
[2] 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.
[5] She was offered employment at the Daily Express but this was later withdrawn when its National Union of Journalists chapel father declared that a woman being sent to the scene of a rail accident or something similar would not be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 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.
[7] 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).
[2] While attending a victory celebration at the end of the war held outside Dhaka,[8] 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.
[2] 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.
At the same time, Tweedie built up a large portfolio of portraits of well-known people and contributed an entire chapter to a book concerning photojournalists and war correspondents.
[2] Tweedie returned to Arnhem Land in late 2005 on behalf of Australian Geographic,[9] and made an acclaimed presentation at the 2009 National Union of Journalists' Photographers' conference in London.
Tweedie's final work came by the National Trust, and her last publication came in 2010 which contained photographs of Kent and Sussex celebrating thirty years of Hospice in the Weald.