Bill Brandt: Portraits

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Bill Brandt: A Centenary Retrospective, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Curated by John-Paul Kernot. [9] [10]

One could argue that photography as an art form reveals the least about its creator. What’s being photographed already exists in the world; the photographer finds it, frames the image and presses the shutter. Whether wrong or right, this attitude suited Bill Brandt, a retiring, mysterious man who so successfully reinvented himself that toward the end of his life he was proclaimed Britain’s most renowned photographer. At the time, critics and collectors had no idea that he was German and hadn’t moved to London until his thirties. The English at Home. Introduction by Raymond Mortimer. London: B. T. Batsford/New York: C. Scribner's, 1936. Brandt's relationship with Moore, and, indeed, a general affinity with the sculptural form, saw him also photograph the work of many important sculptors including Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Aristide Maillol. Droth writes, "Photography offered possibilities for experimentation that went beyond documentation. During Brandt's 1956 trip to St Ives to photograph Hepworth, he staged her sculptures in beach landscapes [...] in what must have been an elaborate undertaking [the pieces] were transported to the beach and photographed on the shoreline. Reclining Figure, Involute and Orpheus appear like monuments that have mysteriously risen from the seabed".Bill Brandt is regarded as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century. He is best known for his surrealist influenced nudes and his photos of London during the Blitz. After being sent to Vienna for lung analysis in 1927 he met the Austrian writer, Dr. Eugenie Schwarzwald. She suggested that he should pursue a career in photography. Photography Career Brandt followed her advice and secured an apprenticeship with the Austrian photographer Grete Kolliner. Brandt, who emerged as the outstanding chronicler in pictures of the English working classes in the inter wars years, made his first visit to northern England in the summer of 1937 where he encountered first-hand the financial hardship of communities crippled by 80 percent unemployment following the closure of local mills and collieries. In one of his most famous, and most poignant, photographs of the series, Coal-searcher Going Home to Jarrow, Brandt documented the act of "coal-searching" whereby his subject, pictured by Brandt pushing his heavily laden bicycle up a steep path, had foraged on local slag heaps for small lumps of coal with which he might use to heat his home. Images such as this, which is rendered in a sharp wintry high contrast of light and dark tones, were complemented with more claustrophobic scenes of cramped interior living conditions. This image was not published, however, until 1947 when Picture Post presented it as a visual contrast to the age of austerity and rationing that had followed in Britain in the immediate war years.

Hermanson Meister, Sarah. Shadow and Light. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013. ISBN 9780870708459. Both a visual poet and a historian, his pictures capture and preserve a world that has disappeared forever. The Museum of Modern Art has taken on the task of distilling Brandt's lifetime oeuvre into a comprehensive retrospective, which opened Wednesday. The exhibition's catalog describes him as "the artist who defined the potential of photographic modernism in England for much of the twentieth century." Brandt’s work has influenced many photographers including Robert Frank, Sir Don McCullin, David Bailey and Roger Mayne.

Although he photographed on occasion for the News Chronicle and Weekly Illustrated, Brandt was not in demand as a photojournalist until the foundation (by the great picture-editor Stefan Lorant) of Lilliput (1937) and Picture Post (1938). The majority of Brandt's earliest English photographs were first published in Brandt’s The English at Home (1936). Brandt greatly admired the work of fellow photographer and close friend Brassaï. In fact, Brandt’s second book, A Night in London (1938) was based on Brassaï’s Paris de Nuit (1933).

Suspended social life, long railway journeys and the need to reaffirm ideas of national identity all encouraged a return to the literary classics. Brandt shared in this. He read and admired the writings of the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy, George Crabbe and John Clare, some of whose poems he knew by heart. From 1945 onwards Brandt contributed a series of landscape photographs, accompanied by texts selected from British writers, to Lilliput. Other landscapes appeared in Picture Post and the American magazine Harper's Bazaar. I photographed pubs, common lodging houses at night, theatres, Turkish baths, prisons and people in their bedrooms. London has changed so much that some of these pictures now have a period charm almost of another century.' Brandt had his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1969. His work has since been the subject of major retrospectives in both the UK and abroad.

MHG BREXIT WALL

Today Tate Britain opens a free exhibition dedicated to celebrated British photographer Bill Brandt (1904-83). 44 original photographs from across his career are displayed alongside the magazines and photobooks in which these images were most often seen. Entitled Bill Brandt: Inside the Mirror, this is Tate’s first Brandt exhibition. It reveals the secrets of his artistry and the fascinating ways he staged and refined his photographs. Drawn from Tate’s collection, the show includes many recent acquisitions which reflect Tate’s ongoing commitment to strengthening its holdings of photography. In 1977, Brandt began a second series of nudes, which appeared along with some earlier photographs in the book Nudes 1945-1980(1981). His work from this period was never embraced by critics and is rarely included in retrospectives of his work. Cyril Connolly published Brandt's shelter photographs in Horizon in February 1942. In 1966 Connolly wrote that '"Elephant and Castle 3.45 a.m." eternalises for me the dreamlike monotony of wartime London.' Brandt himself recalled 'the long alley of intermingled bodies, with the hot, smelly air and continual murmur of snores'. Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you.

Knoblauch, Loring (6 May 2013). "Bill Brandt, Early Prints from the Collection of the Family @Edwynn Houk". Collector Daily . Retrieved 8 August 2020. The extreme social contrast, during those years before the war, was, visually, very inspiring for me. I started by photographing in London, the West End, the suburbs, the slums.'René Magritte (1898-1967), 1966, taken in his studio in Brussels, with his picture of ‘The Great War.’ After several years of working on the project, he published his first book, The English at Homein 1936.