Bill Brandt, Photographer | Spitalfields Life (2024)

Continuing his series of profiles of photographers who pictured the East End in the twentieth century, Contributing Writer Mark Richards explores the photography of Bill Brandt

East End girl dancing the Lambeth Walk, 1939

The most influential modernist photographer of his generation, Bill Brandt revealed a unique way of interpreting the world through photography, making the mundane appear strange and, at times, unnerving. Over three decades, his images of London and elsewhere in England, represent an important record of social history in this country. Although he is less well known than figures such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brandt remains one of the most complex and significant personalities in a golden age of photography on film.

Contemplating Brandt’s work, the first thing you must recognise is that his images share a common quality – as a viewer, you are seeing what he wants you to see. Even the subjects of his photographs are not always who they purport to be. Brandt sought reality through artifice – what mattered to him was the final image not his route to it. He controlled every aspect of his photography, composition, setting and printing. His captions are often deliberately ambiguous, leaving the viewer to draw their own interpretation, contributing to the surrealism that pervades much of his work, especially his portraiture.

Speaking of his photography, Brandt said –“I believe this power of seeing the world as fresh and strange lies hidden in every human being. Vicariously, through another person’s eyes, men and women can see the world anew. It is shown to them as something interesting and exciting. There is given to them again a sense of wonder. This should be the photographer’s aim, for this is the purpose that pictures fulfil in the world as it is today – to meet a need that people cannot or will not meet for themselves. We are most of us too busy, too worried, too intent on proving ourselves right, too obsessed with ideas to stand and stare.”

The influence of earlier photographers such as Man Ray and Brassaï can be seen in his early work. Yet Brandt later surpassed both – in terms of his ability to generate a sense of wonder and also of disappointment, when his style became inconsistent and unpredictable.

Brandt established his reputation in the thirties through publication of two books: The English at Home (1936) and A Night in London (1938). The photography in The English at Home bears similarities to the work of Edith Tudor-Hart and they had both been in Vienna in 1934, although their lives and motivations were distinctly different. A Night in London was undoubtedly influenced heavily by Brassaï and his seminalParis de Nuit (1932). Both of Brandt’s books were social documentaries and comprise images that are immediately accessible yet also sometimes challenging to the casual viewer. Couple in Peckham, 1936 is one of these unsettling images that raises more questions than answers, an ambiguity compounded by the wording of the title.

Unlike some of his contemporaries, Brandt pursued an unfettered approach to photography, in line with his personal life which was Bohemian and unconventional for the time. He cast aside aesthetic rules in his search for artistic expression through photography and rejected social norms in his personal life too. This disregard for convention was the key to many of his most striking images.

In 1948, he said:“I am not interested in rules and conventions … photography is not a sport. If I think a picture will look better brilliantly lit, I use lights, or even flash. It is the result that counts, no matter how it was achieved. I find the darkroom work most important, as I can finish the composition of a picture only under the enlarger. I do not understand why this is supposed to interfere with the truth. Photographers should follow their own judgment, and not the fads and dictates of others”

Born into a well-off family, Brandt drifted around Europe throughout his twenties, absorbing influences which would shape his creative work. He said that he began his photographic career in Paris in 1929, where he read surrealist publications such as Bifui, Varietes Minotaure which were publishing photography for its poetic quality for the first time. Also influenced by surrealist films such as Bunuel’sLe Chien Andalou and L’Age d’Or, he saw these as catalysts for a new age of poetic photography. Among the influences acquired during these Paris years, which shaped the rest of Brandt’s career, was the photography of Eugène Atget who had died a few years earlier but whose work was just being recognised then.

Brandt was fortunate to be offered an opportunity to work as a pupil in Man Ray’s studio and this was a seminal point in his photographic career. He learned from Man Ray who became his role-model. Brandt considered him to be the most original photographer in the world, working at that time with his inventions of solarisation and Rayographs.

Brandt was attracted to photography both as social reportage and as poetry, with Edward Weston and Man Ray drawing him towards the latter. Yet before the war, Brandt’s photography was mainly social documentary and, like Edith Tudor-Hart, he was fascinated by the extreme social contrast between the rich and poor. When photographing for The English at Home, Brandt first started in the West End, portraying the well-off and the social structures that supported their lavish lifestyles. Then he contrasted these images with a series of photographs of the East End. To this day, these images retain their impact as records of lost lifestyles at both ends of the social spectrum. His photograph East End girl dancing the Lambeth Walk, 1939 possesses a joyful innocence that is in poignant contrast what lay just ahead.

In 1937, Brandt headed north to the Durham Coalfields and took some of his most powerful images of England in the thirties. He considered his photograph of a coal searcher with a bicycle to be the most successful of this series and it is impossible to look at that image without being moved by his sympathetic representation of working-class life during a period of mass unemployment. Brandt’s Coal miners’ houses with no windows to the street, East Durham 1937 is stark and surreal, inviting accusations that it was manipulated although there is no evidence that it was. The picture’s location is deliberately ambiguous and it challenges our preconceptions of life in East Durham at that time.

Returning to London, Brandt set about photographing the nocturnal city at night for his next book. The result was a remarkable series of noir photographs, some of indistinct shapes and others of characters lost in the blackness of London after nightfall.

Unlike those who engaged with their subjects, Brandt was deliberately distant when photographing people in their homes, concentrating on the surroundings and the image as a whole. It was an approach which contributed an otherworldly feel to the images.

Brandt outlined his strategy thus –“I always take portraits in my sitter’s own surroundings. I concentrate very much on the picture as a whole and leave the sitter rather to himself. I hardly talk and barely look at him. This often seems to make people forget what is going on and any affected or self-conscious expression usually disappears… I think a good portrait ought to tell something of the subject’s past and suggest something of his future.”

When he moved into portraiture, the majority were initially published by Liliput and then Harper’s Bazaar but he also had pictures printed in Picture Post. His focus was on literary and artistic figures and, to my knowledge, he never photographed politicians or sports personalities. Brandt began experimenting further with his technique, purchasing an old extreme wide-angle camera and using this to challenge traditional portraiture. The distorting effect and deep depth of field were reminiscent of the new cinematography at that time and one of his most well-known images in this genre Portrait of a young girl, Eaton Place may have been inspired by Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.

After the war, Brandt’s style changed dramatically again. He lost interest in documentary. Everyone else was doing it by then. Often asked about this change, he revealed that he believed the basis of his social images of the thirties had been eroded by a new social order.

“my main theme of the past few years had disappeared; England was no longer a country of marked social contrast. Whatever the reason, the poetic trend of photography, which had already excited me in my early Paris days, began to fascinate me again. it seemed to me that there were wide fields still unexplored. I began to photograph nudes, portraits, and landscapes”

Much of the character of what Brandt achieved in his earlier period was manufactured in the darkroom. This work was notable for its subtlety – something which can only be appreciated in the original print. It was one of the reasons why his work attracted the attention of museums and galleries. When Brandt changed his style, much of the subtlety of his atmospheric images of the thirties was deliberately sacrificed and, in his nudes of the fifties, we are confronted with deep shadows and burned-out highlights. It was an approach which led to the erosion of his reputation in some quarters but Brandt remained defiant.

The impact of this aesthetic transformation was revealed in an exchange of letters between Edward Steichen, curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Brandt in 1959 in which Steichen reluctantly expressed his concerns over what he perceived to be the deteriorating quality of Brandt’s prints. Brandt was deeply hurt by Steichen’s criticism but defended the change, saying that the highly contrasted black and white effect suited his pictures better.

Since his death, copies of Brandt’s photographs made without regard to his artistic preferences and distributed through the internet have compromised the understanding and appreciation of his photography. The only real way to understand Brandt as a photographer is through his original prints. The quality of reproduction inShadows and Light by Sarah Hermanson Meister is the closest any publication I am aware of has come to Brandt’s intentions and I recommend it to anyone who wishes to learn more about this remarkable photographer.