The twenty short years between the end of World War I and the beginning of World War II saw the most incredible flowering of western art in the history of mankind. The death and destruction of the “war to end all wars” brought about a cultural rejection of the staid classical, naturalistic, and romantic works of the pre-war years. In the course of one generation rapid technological progress inspired new hopes for the future and an exciting artistic metamorphosis replaced the nihilism of the war years. The artistic void was filled with abstract, surrealistic and ultra realistic works from new artists working with new materials in new genres.
New perspectives redefined popular thought toward art, and a whole new creative aesthetic emerged. Kandinsky, Picasso, and Dali moved painting from impressionism and naturalism to cubism, surrealism, and abstraction. Film makers Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, F. W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Luis Bunuel, and Alfred Hitchcock helped to create a new art form, a relevant and powerful medium for social commentary, from what had been only a curiosity and novelty. Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Lawrence, Eliot, Pound, and Cummings redefined poetry, and the novel.
This vibrant era saw the birth of photography as an art form completely separate and independent of painting for the first time; an incredibly potent, and immediate medium for mass communication. Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray, Brassai, Robert Doisneau, Clarence John Laughlin, Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Bill Brandt gave the world a new way of looking at society and humanity; a telling and sensitive portrait of who we were, where we had been, and where we might be going.
The Photographer
Bill Brandt was one of the twentieth century’s most prolific and important visual artists, and unlike most of his contemporaries, Brandt’s photographic work covered an incredible range of topics and genres. As a photographer, he was equally adept at harsh ultra-realistic documentary images of downtrodden industrial workers, surreal nude studies, abstract and dramatic English literary landscapes, and an enigmatic series of sensitive portraits of English writers and artists.
Brandt is universally regarded as the most important British photographer of the twentieth century. He has always been regarded as something of an artistic enigma because of the broad variety of influences, which affected his work in ways that often caused consternation among his peers, and the art critics of his day.
Brandt was born into a wealthy merchant family in Hamburg, Germany in 1904. After completing a classical European education and traveling widely he was psychoanalyzed as a young man by one of Freud’s contemporaries, who suggested photography as a creative outlet. Brandt moved to Paris and studied with surrealist photographer Man Ray, who was a major influence on his work. Brassai, Hemingway, Dali, Picasso, and the artists of Bohemian Paris also heavily influenced Brandt. Like many young men of his generation, he was totally mesmerized by the surrealist cinema (especially the Bunuel/Dali collaboration “Un Chien Andalou”), German Expressionist films, and Alfred Hitchcock. In later years actor/director Orson Welles became a strong and enduring influence.
Brandt moved to England in 1931, and the landscapes, literary history, social environment, and character of Britain became his most constant and enduring theme. He chose to use his newly discovered artistic medium to show the British their real faces, just as his friend Brassai had done with the French. Prowling London, using the magical lighting of the city at night, he recorded the quintessential view of England between the world wars.
By the late thirties his interest had shifted to documentary reportage on the economic and social conditions in the gritty cities of England’s industrial north country. During World War II, Brandt’s images of Londoners and their city coping with the blitz, the blackout, and life in air-raid shelters showed the world the stubborn determination and spunky courageous spirit of a nation under attack, but unbowed.
After the war Brandt devoted himself to portraiture, landscapes, and nude photography. It was his revolutionary nude photography that brought him his first real fame and notoriety. He shot his nudes with an antique plate camera that had formerly been used by the London Police to document crime scenes. The camera lacked a shutter and was equipped with a wide-angle lens that caused exaggerated body perspectives and inspired a menacing atmosphere which seemed to be surrealistic and ultra-realistic simultaneously. The images were often starkly and emotionally lit, almost like police “murder scene” photographs, as though inspired by the films of F. W. Murnau or Alfred Hitchcock.
Brandt’s unnatural perspectives, shocked people at the time, but they were based on the same solid artistic principles of enlargement of volumes, experiments with perception and perspective/point of view, and close-up treatment of details which fascinated fellow artists Picasso, Henry Moore, and Andre Kertesz. In the later years of his career his passion for moody mystical and romantic landscapes evoking Britain’s rich literary heritage, and enigmatic portraits of prominent British writers and artists portrayed thoughtfully and in isolation, dominated his work. He rarely photographed politicians or businessmen.
Techniques and Methods
Brandt was a self-taught photographer, a poet of the darkness, who disdained mid-tones and used black and white so expressively (like many of the film directors who influenced him), that his body of work might be labeled “photo noir”. In the context of the art of his time, Bill Brandt was one of the first photographers to have developed a distinct individual style. He consciously worked to create a personal photographic language based on the alliance between form and content, the artistic tension inherent in experiment, and the surreal exploration of the imaginary and the mystical.
Brandt refused to be bound by the photographic rules and expectations of his era or his contemporaries. He would often labor over an image in the darkroom until he felt that he could get nothing more from the negative. He would take charcoal and india ink to the finished print, adding the detail that he felt was missing. He would then re-photograph the print and begin again, using the manipulated negative to achieve the look he wanted. For photographers of the thirties, forties, and fifties this approach was blasphemous. The finished print was sacrosanct, and all manipulation of the image was done in the dark room, from the original negative. Re-photographing a manipulated print was sacrilegious, and re-printing the manipulated negative as an original was thought to be dishonest.
For Brandt each image was a separate entity, and each was dealt with strictly on its own merits. While most of his contemporaries felt that consistent work methods (technical proficiency, standard materials, use of some variant of the zone system in printing, etc.) were what set serious photographic artists apart from amateurs, Brandt refused to accept any particular process or method for achieving his desired results. Writing of his work Brandt said, “Photography is still a very new medium and everything must be tried and dared…photography has no rules. It is not a sport. It is the result which counts, no matter how it is achieved.”
The Book
Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt is an impressive collection of images, covering the photographer’s career, from 1928 until 1983. Brandt’s people are almost always representative and archetypal, faces usually in shadow, rather than actual depictions of individuals. In his portraits, Brandt submerges his subjects in shadow and darkness, an approach that obscures rather than reveals the character. His skies are almost always dark and moody, with rain about to fall. In his documentary photography the gritty industrial architecture of England’s North Country bears down heavily on the tiny powerless workers. Brandt had little interest in the subtle gradations between light and dark, instead stark whites, gloomy shadows, and broad spaces of velvety black became his signature elements. The highly personal nudes that came to dominate his work immediately after World War II, pose unselfconsciously, their limbs often surrealistically distorted, in dark London apartments and beside deserted beaches.
Bill Brandt’s work is beautifully represented in this volume, which contains 375 black-and-white photographs covering his 55-year career. Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt, includes several interpretive essays and is divided into eight sections that more or less parallel the different artistic periods that defined Brandt’s life. A European Apprentice, Observing the English, Courting the Surreal, Journeys North, The Dark City, A Return to Poetry, Portraying the Artist, and the Perfection of Form. This huge volume is an excellent introduction to the life and work of Bill Brandt. Brandt’s body of work constitutes one of the most important social and artistic documents of life in the twentieth century.
Brandt’s work was shown in numerous exhibitions in Europe and the US during his career, including two one-person exhibitions at the MOMA (in 1948 and in 1969) He published over a dozen books of his photographs covering the period from the 1930s through the 1980s. Brandt’s photographs are in the permanent collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum (London), the Bibliotheque Nationale (Paris) the Museum of Modern Art (New York), and the National Gallery of Art (Washington, D.C.).
Artistic Significance/Historic Relevance
Bill Brandt's body of work is England's major contribution to 20th century historic photography. Brandt welded the two dominant (and disparate) currents of modernist photography, the documentary and the surreal, into a singular and distinctively personal and intensely expressive style. Brandt's work ranges from direct photojournalism and atmospheric landscapes, to stark portraits and high contrast nudes. In contrast to his contemporaries, Brandt developed a style that is often described as the dark brooding evocations of a surreal dream world, an expressive style that pushed the accepted boundaries of photography to their absolute limits.
The Authors
Bill Jay is professor of photography studies at Arizona State University and the editor of Advertising Art, a groundbreaking British photography journal. Mr. Jay knew and worked professionally with Bill Brandt for many years. He is the author of 15 books on the history and criticism of photography. Nigel Warburton Teaches the Philosophy of Aesthetics at England's Open University. He has published several books, and written numerous articles on photography and criticism.
Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt
by Bill Jay and Nigel Warburton
Foreword by David Hockney
Harry N. Abrams, 1999 ISBN 0810941090
320 pages 375 duotone images
$75.00 (available at Amazon.com for $52.50)
If you’d like to see some of Bill Brandt’s images, follow the link below:
http://www.billbrandt.com/Gallery/gallery_fs.html
Note: “Literary Britain” by Bill Brandt (a collection of literary landscapes) was the first photographic book I ever owned. My mother bought it for me when I was about 12 years old because she knew I loved reading British Classical Literature.
If You Enjoyed Reading This Photographic Book Review, Please Read my other reviews of Photographic Books:
Doisneau: Retrospective by Peter Hamilton
http://www.epinions.com/content_42163605124
“Haunter of Ruins” The Photography of Clarence John Laughlin
http://www.epinions.com/content_35055898244
“Live Steam” Paddlewheel Steamboats on the Mississippi System by John Kral
http://www.epinions.com/content_31470227076/tk_~CB005.1.7
“Not Fade Away” The Rock and Roll Photography of Jim Marshall
http://www.epinions.com/content_20411747972
Wynn Bullock “The Enchanted Landscape” Photographs 1940-1975
http://www.epinions.com/book-review-5DDB-80C8F3E-39DB828E-prod1
“Atkins—Girls Night Out” by Chloe Atkins
http://www.epinions.com/content_28351106692/tk_~CB008.1.1
just “cut’n’paste” the URL into your browser’s address window
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