Bill Brandt

“A photographer is allowed to do anything, anything, in order to improve his picture.”

Bill Brandt (Tate Britain 2022 Exhibition)

I’ve often referred to Brandt in my studies, as his work is among my favourites. We had an opportunity to look at if in a little more detail in one of the previous course exercises (https://documentary515050.wordpress.com/2020/11/07/2-campany-on-brandt/) but a small but excellent exhibition at Tate Britain gives me a chance to go in to a little more detail.

It is perhaps useful to compare and contrast. For me the enduring element of Brand’t work is the aesthetic, which exists beyond any relevance. This is not to say in any way that they lack documentary value, but more to point out they exist in what I regard as a kind of sweet spot for photography between visual and narrative impact. Campany discusses Brand’ “single image” approach, which may derive from this aesthetic value but I questioned this at the time – in the exhibition we see how Brandt arranged the pictures in pairs (e.g. in The English at Home) so that the shapes or motifs worked together. However they can also work individually – particularly photographs such as Footsteps coming closer, where there is a clear single-image narrative. The white chin line contrasting with the shadows at the top right of the print, whilst a small part of this image, seems to foretell Brandt’s later famous high contrast nude.

Furthermore a striking quote from the exhibition reveals how Brandt found the social contrast of the thirties “visually exciting … I never intended them for political propaganda” (Tate Britain 2022 Exhibition). Revisiting Bill Jay’s essay on Brandt that introduces his retrospective I note his observation that the critics “typical reactions to Bill Brandt’s images, and their vastly different tone from Brand’t stated intent” (Jay & Warburton, 1999:12).

David Hockney adds “His techniques understand the power of images. It’s this that, for me, gives them their strength in a time when the photograph as documentary evidence is fading fast. They survive and enter the memory because they were constructed by an artist” (Jay & Warburton, 1999:2).

It is in fact this construction process that the exhibition begins with, since Brandt interfered with the print more than most. “Photography is not a sport. There are no rules” (V&A, s.d.) as he was famous for saying. He emphasised the importance of darkroom work and was adamant it should not be altered for publication. However he often updated his view on how the negative should be printed, any in any case did not keep detailed records for each negative, preferring to work with intuition. Generally, although not completely consistently, he favoured a high-contrast style after 1951. Earlier prints were for magazine publication, the process of which tended to heighten contrast further and Warburton intriguingly suggests that Brandt may have been anticipating that. Later prints were for selling directly to collectors, etc. and from the 80s he was reluctant to exhibit any vintage prints from the 30s/40s. Warburton also introduces the notion of printing as a performance of the image.

But he went well beyond the usual contrast adjustment and dodging/burning. He often retouched, sometimes fairly obviously such as the hog print on show at the Tate. In another print a handkerchief has been scratched back to the bare white paper to increase its contrast with the jacket. He paints in a violin bow, uses multiple exposures such as arms crossing the body in the nude perspectives, and even montage for the seagull in the London Bridge 1939 image.

The influence of surrealism is of course reviewed – Brandt studied with Man Ray in Paris for a time. We see a pair of bowler hatted race goers twinned in both dress and gesture, and at the market a fish carried on a large leather bowler adapted to the task. Brandt also photographed Magritte in suit and bowler, holding one of his bowler paintings. The exhibition also explores the surreal influence of Alice in Wonderland on interiors such as Portrait of a Young Girl, Eaton Place in 1955, and the button-chair motif that Brandt used in several of his pictures.

Exhibition image from Tate Britain 2022 taken by me

In his essay Jay makes much of the “tripod” of styles – pictorialism, surrealism and documentary – upon which Brandt based his images, claiming that “pictorialism was a relatively new idea charged with potential” (Jay & Warburton, 1999:15). However even wikipedia acknowledges that “pictorialism was declining in popularity by the 1920’s” (N.B. check for attributable quote elsewhere). Jay does somewhat indirectly suggest that the atmosphere that Brandt saw as key may have morphed from pictorialism to surrealism – a fascinating idea, particularly as we can consider an original idea of surrealism to be the strangeness of the real, which ties in so well with Brandt’s aim of capturing the “familiar but strange”.

This is developed further in his famous Perspectives on Nudes series, developed from his discovery of an old Kodak with a very wide, almost pinhole lens focused on infinity. Previously he had used a Rolleiflex, often with flash. “I continued to let the lenses discover the images for me…” (Tate Britain 2022 exhibition). Brandt was strongly influenced by Citizen Kane, which he saw many times after its release in 1944, admiring the deep depth-of-field with which the film captured interiors such as at Xanadu. Here there is also pairing: of shapes such as toes with pebbles, hips with terrain lines; and of textures, such as freckled skin with sand and hair with striated rock. The discovery process was long, however – 9 years of photographing his partner Beckett yielded 23 pictures. He is interrogating the role of the model, and indeed the role of art in recording its subject – he published a photo story about the work of a life model, as well as his brother Brandt painting a model and made a further image of a model’s legs arranged to mimic the shapes in one of Rolf’s paintings in the background. It could also be argued that showcasing how the camera sees is a distinctly modernist approach – as the critics found Brandt’s work is notoriously difficult to pin down, which is perhaps what makes it so fascinating.

Models, particularly family models, were important to Brandt since he frequently staged his images using friends and relations, even for his documentary work. His Parlourmaid series was shot at the house of his Uncle Henry. “He felt he could achieve a more meaningful kind of realism by engaging and gaining cooperation with those he photographed” (Tate Britain 2022 Exhibition). In this regard I note a similarity with the approach of Klein, also recently reviewed and another photographer to earn special attention from David Campany (see https://photo515050level3.wordpress.com/2022/10/12/william-klein-yes/).

Looking again at Brandt’s work on the Sussex coast, it strikes me that I could make a different use of this effect to suggest the human interaction on the landscape – for example an arm stretching out across a flat horizon at the end of which the hand appears to be re-arranging the landscape – or pointing at an iconic element echoing the Creation of Adam on the Sistine chapel. However I should tread carefully – I don’t really intend to, or think I could, make a series out of this and the use of one or two images in a landscape series might throw it out of balance?

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Campany, D. (2006) Bill Brandt’s Art of the Document. At: https://davidcampany.com/bill-brandts-art-of-the-document/ (Accessed 4.1.2023)
2. Jay, B. & Warburton, N. (1999). Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt. London: Thames & Hudson.
3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictorialism (Accessed 4.1.2023)
4. V&A. (s.d.) Bill Brandt: working methods. At: https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/bill-brandt-working-methods (Accessed 4.1.2023)