The Iris and B. Gerald Cantor Center for Visual Arts owns 25 photographs by Bill Brandt, which span the whole breadth of his career. First a documentary photojournalist, later a portratist and fine-art photographer known for his ingenious mixture of nud

Olivia Lau

Bill Brandt is one of the great British photographers of the 20th century. First as a documentary photojournalist and portraitist, and later as a fine-art photographer, Brandt’s work embodies an aesthetic which is wholly modern. The Cantor Center for Visual Arts at Stanford University is fortunate to own 25 photographs by Bill Brandt. Although Brandt made them in the late 1970s, these prints span the breadth of his career, from a house-wife washing her door-step in London’s East End (1935) to his perspective-manipulating nudes (1961). The Cantor Center’s collection includes eleven prints of Brandt’s work in the 1930s. Examination of these works as historical texts reveals the condition of the working poor in England during the inter-war period. However, photography is a device for finding and framing objects; Brandt’s photographs must be viewed in context of the photographer who has found and framed these objects. Examination of Brandt’s later printing style, his background and entry into professional photography, and the Cantor Center’s particular prints highlights the aspects of Brandt’s work which makes him a member of the pantheon of great, modern photographers.

Although the Cantor Center’s prints by Brandt are signed by the hand of the photographer, the fact that they were printed in the late 1970s means that they are not the highly valued "vintage" prints, made soon after the photographer shot the negative. Indeed, earlier prints made in the 1930s (in collections at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York) are very different from these later printings. The earlier prints are closer to the standards of the modern photographic aesthetic: they possess a wide tonal scale, which produces a sense of inner light within the image. The later prints are at odds with this convention, because they emphasize the grain of the image, which destroys the illusion of photography as a seamless representation of reality, and they heighten the black/white contrast, which destroys the sense of luminosity. For his last book, Shadow of Light (1966), Brandt reprinted his earlier work in this later style. Hence, the Cantor Center’s prints are granier and more contrasty than his early work.

Although they are not vintage prints, the Cantor Center’s collection of Brandt work consists of authentic prints, made by the hand of the photographer, and conforming to his artistic vision. Nigel Warburton, editor of several books on Brandt’s photography, argues that these later prints are more authentic, and are of more artistic value than the art market’s vintage prints. Warburton notes,

Surely if we are going to acknowledge that photographers can, and in many cases do, make significant artistic choices in the darkroom, then it is absurd to stipulate that these choices must be made a short (usually unspecified) time after the photograph has been taken. Why can’t the photographer continue to reinterpret the negative? In fact, this is what many great photographers have done throughout their careers. (1)

Indeed, while Brandt developed an eye for composition behind the lens early in his career, he did not discover a printing aesthetic to fit his personal style until 1951. Brandt notes, "Before 1951, I liked my prints dark and muddy. Now I prefer the very contrasting black-and-white effect. It looks crisper, more dramatic and very different from color photographs." (2) Color is a representation of reality; black-and-white a reduction to elemental forms. Although the Cantor Center’s photographs are not vintage prints, they convey Brandt’s message in a form more suitable to his personal sensibilities.

Grainy, contrasty printing is reminiscent of the photogravure technique of photographic reproduction, used during this period to mass produce images. Photogravure heightens the black/white contrast of the photograph, and increases the size of the grain. Thus, Brandt’s printing technique creates the sense that his later prints are the product of a photojournalist who documents the truth, not a fine-art photographer who interprets the world. Brandt’s later prints reproduce the feel of his mass produced images from inter-war magazines.

In a formal sense, these later Brandt prints are more suitable to the subject matter of his work. During the 1930s, Brandt worked for the nascent magazine industry, documenting inequality and incongruities in English society. Working with such a topic, it is appropriate to use sharp tonalities, because the subject is not beautiful and luminous, but a matter of harsh fact. Examination of Brandt’s family background, his entry into professional photography, and his entry into photojournalism reveals why Brandt was interested in English society, and why he approached this subject as he did.

As archivist of Bill Brandt’s work at the Victoria & Albert Museum, Mark Hayworth-Booth is the pre-eminent authority on Brandt’s life. His introduction to Bill Brandt: Behind the Camera offers a summary of Brandt’s biographical background. Three important points emerge. First, Brandt’s background is neither wholly English nor wholly German. Bill Brandt was born Hermann Wilhelm Brandt in 1904, in Hamburg. Hayworth-Booth notes,

His father, L.W. Brandt, was a British subject, but his family background was continental European. In 1900, L.W. Brandt, head of an import/export firm, married Lili Merck, daughter of a Hamburg family noted for public service and their interest in the arts. (3)

Although other art critics have speculated that Brandt experienced discrimination during the First World War because of his British background, Hayworth-Booth does not substantiate this claim. However, Brandt’s mixed heritage later influenced his photography. In the introduction to Brandt’s first book, The English at Home, Raymond Mortimer observes, "Mr. Bill Brandt is British by birth, but he has spent most of his life abroad, and has thus been able to pick out what makes this country different from others." (4) Although Mortimer is technically incorrect when he states that Brandt is British by birth, he is correct in his statement that Brandt is not culturally British, but views his adopted homeland through the eyes of a one not immediately familiar with the norms of British society. Particularly striking to Brandt’s foreign eyes is the drastic inequality of English society during the inter-war economic depression.

Second, Hayworth-Booth recounts how the Viennese socialite Dr. Eugenie Schwarzwald was important in the very early stages of Brandt’s career. Tuberculosis sent Brandt to a Swiss sanatorium for six years. There, he heard of a psychoanalyst in Vienna who could cure all illnesses. His brother Rolf, already in Vienna, introduced Brandt to Dr. Eugenie Schwarzwald. Schwarzwald was not a disciple of Freud, and, doubtful of the value of psychoanalysis in the case of a lung infection, sent Brandt to a lung specialist who pronounced him cured. Having restored him to health, Schwarzwald found a career for her new protégé. Hayworth-Booth recounts the possibly apocryphal story that "she sat down with Bill Brandt and nominated suitable careers, checking them off on her fingers one by one. For no known reason Bill Brandt stopped her at photography." (5) Schwarzwald found a place for Brandt as an assistant in a portrait studio in Vienna. When Erza Pound came to visit the Schwarzwalds, Brandt took his portrait. Pound was so taken by this work that he introduced Brandt to the studio of Man Ray in Paris. (6) During this period, Brandt traveled all over Western Europe, photographing fountains in Barcelona, and street markets in London. Although Brandt received little attention and less instruction during his time as a pupil of the great Surrealist photographer, he became familiar with the nascent approaches to photography as a medium-specific form of art. He notes,

[A]lready two trends were emerging: the poetic school, of which Man Ray and Edward Weston were the leaders, and the documentary moment-of-truth school. I was attracted to both, but when I returned to England in 1931, and for over ten years thereafter, I concentrated entirely on documentary work. (7)

For various reasons, possibly because he was artistically attracted to the contrasts of English society, or possibly because of his father’s English background, Brandt adopted England as his new home. In England, Brandt devoted himself to photography as journalism, and faithfully documented the state of English society.

The third point which emerges from Hayworth-Booth’s biographical work is the importance of Stefan Lorant in shaping the inter-war photojournalist aesthetic, in which Brandt participated. Brandt worked for Lilliput, Picture Post, and The Weekly Illustrated, all journals which Lorant had founded. Hayworth-Booth observes,

An important meeting occurred in 1936 when Bill Brandt visited the London offices of the magazine Weekly Illustrated. This periodical, the first popular picture magazine in Britain to exploit the new resources of photography, was founded in 1934 by Stefan Lorant. This former editor of the German picture magazine Muncher Illustrierte Presse came to England as a refugee from Nazism. (8)

Weekly Illustrated (founded in 1934), Lilliput (1936), and Picture Post (1938) were late starters in the world of journalism with photographs, and benefited from the innovations of German magazine publishing. Sean Smith argues,

In 1938, Picture Post was credited with starting a "revolution" in British magazine publishing; Lorant’s introduction of the photographic and lay-out techniques he had developed in the Weimar "illustrierten" opened up the eyes of the British public, making Picture Post an unprecedented media success. (9)

Bill Brandt’s images of social inequality in England also played a large role in opening the eyes of the British public. Especially in Lilliput and Picture Post, Lorant largely allowed him to formulate his own assignments, and this gave him wide latitude in his choice of subjects. From his work as a photojournalist, Brandt produced three collections of photographs: The English at Home (1936), A Night in London (1938), and Camera in London (1948). From this body of work, two themes emerge: the lives of the poor, and the ordinary turned extraordinary under the enlarger.

The English at Home examines social inequality in English society. Juxtaposing images of Mayfair homes and the East End, Brandt comments, "The extreme social contrast, during those years before the war, was, visually, very inspiring for me." (10) Although he rarely photographed without an assignment, after reading J.B. Priestley’s An English Journey (1934), Brandt took a trip to the north of England, capturing images of coal miners at work and at home, railway stations, and one particularly famous image of a coal scavenger near Jarrow. Again, his theme was social inequality, with an emphasis on the living conditions of the poor. From the Cantor Center’s collection, the "Young Housewife in Bethnal Green" (1935), "A Sheffield Back-yard" (1937), "Back Street in Jarrow, Tyneside" (1937), "Coal-miner’s Bath, Chester le Street , Durham" (1937), "East Durham Coal-Miner Just Home from the Pit" (1937), and "Coal-searcher Going Home to Jarrow" (1937) reflect Brandt’s interest in the lives of the poor.

One of his most famous images, the "Young Housewife in Bethnal Green" (Image 1) depicts a young woman in a dirty striped apron, kneeling over a bucket in a doorway. The sensitivity of Brandt’s portrayal conveys the misery of living in the East End, while maintaining the housewife’s dignity. The door step is what passing strangers see of her home, and she works hard to keep that appearance clean and respectable. The housewife is poor and lives in a poor neighborhood, but she still tries to maintain a certain sense of dignity in her existence.

The other five images ("A Sheffield Back-yard," "Back Street in Jarrow," "Coal-miner’s Bath," "Coal-searcher," and "East Durham Coal-miner") are products of the journey Brandt took to the north of England in 1937. "A Sheffield Back-yard" (Image 2) creates a sense of absolute poverty. A small, unkempt boy stands in the center of a patch of dirt, enclosed on all sides by high mason walls. In the background, laundry hangs to dry and alley cats frolic. The enclosure of the boy makes it seem that he is utterly alone and also utterly uncared-for.

"Back Street in Jarrow" (Image 3) depicts a woman hanging wash from an impromptu clothesline stretched across a alleyway. She stretches a line between the backyards of other families because she herself does not have a backyard. The situation of the stray cat in the extreme foreground draws a parallel between the woman’s condition (without adequate home) and the cat’s condition. The buildings in the background are shrouded in fog, which suggests that this scene is hidden from and forgotten by the rest of the world.

The "East Durham Coal-Miner" and the "Coal-miner’s Bath" stem from a visit Brandt made to the home of a coal miner. The candid and frank character of these images testifies to Brandt’s amazing ability to accurately represent the essential nature of other people’s lives, an element also seen in his portraiture work. "The East Durham Coal-Miner" (Image 4) depicts a shirtless man, smoking with his feet near the stove. Although his home is dim, it is not cluttered. This suggests poverty without suggesting sloth. The miner has worked hard all day, and is now enjoying a cigarette. The "Coal-miner’s Bath" (Image 5) is a scene of familial intimacy. The miner is hunched almost upside-down over a metal basin, while his wife washes his back. The dimness of the interior of the miner’s home, combined with the filth of his wife’s apron suggests a life of poverty. Yet, the muscular strength of the miner’s back suggests that although they are poor, he works hard to keep them with what little comforts they do have. Brandt’s image conveys a sense of dignity (through the intimacy of husband and wife, as well as the miner’s industry) for those who are very poor.

"Coal-searcher" (Image 6) is another of Brandt’s famous images. Brandt himself describes the image:

My most successful picture of the series [from the industrial north], probably because it was symbolical of this time of mass unemployment, was a loose-coal searcher in East Durham, going home in the evening. He was pushing a bicycle along a footpath through a desolate waste-land between Hebburn and Jarrow. Loaded on the crossbar was a sack of small coal, all that he had found after a day’s search on the slag-heaps. (11)

Again, Brandt’s image is suffused with a sense of absolute poverty, and yet maintains a sense of dignity for the subject: although he is poor, he still works for some form of sustenance. As Bill Jay, author of numerous books on the history of photography and photographic criticism, argues, "[I]n order to learn from Brandt and his work you must approach them with a sensitized but blank mind," (12) rejecting preconceived notions and prejudiced opinions. In these images, Brandt challenges the conventional, bourgeois notion that the poor are lazy. He portrays the poor as a set of individuals defined by the unfortunate economic downturn after World War I. Never does Brandt depict someone who is both poor and shiftless. Brandt’s images convey the notion that the poor of England are poor because of circumstance, not laziness.

The second theme which emerges from Brandt’s pre-war work is a fascination with London, not just as a microcosm of social inequality, but as a place which possessed "atmosphere," to use Brandt’s term. As Brandt comments,

I found atmosphere to be the spell that charged the commonplace with beauty. . . . it is a combination of elements, perhaps most simply and yet most inadequately described in technical terms of lighting and viewpoint, which reveals the subject as familiar and yet strange. (13)

This focus on atmosphere produced A Night in London (1938), which transformed the populated and busy city into a desolate landscape defined not by light, but by shadow. Although the images in the Cantor collection are not restricted to London, "Grand Union Canal" (1935), "Policeman in Bermondsey" (1935), "Rainswept Roofs" (1935), "A Snicket in Halifax" (1937), and "Train Leaving Newcastle" (1937) reflect Brandt’s sense of atmosphere.

"Grand Union Canal" and "Rainswept Roofs" appeared in Brandt’s collection, The English at Home. Both of these compositions use water to transform a familiar image into something strange. In "Grand Union Canal," (Image 7) the reflection of two-story homes in the still water of the canal makes the homes seem four stories high. After the great fire of 1666, London building codes deemed that certain houses be four stories tall, others three, and others two, depending on the location of the house. Generally, the more exclusive and respectable the neighborhood, the taller the houses. The reflection from the canal makes these humble homes seem far grander than they are in real life.

"Rainswept Roofs" (Image 8) is a negative which has appeared in a various incarnations. In The English at Home, the image covers a wider angle of view, and the houses face the other way. In this later print, Brandt reversed the image (flipped the negative emulsion side up while printing) and cropped a significant portion of the negative. Compositionally, the contrast of the image highlights the wetness of the roofs, which produces parallel lines which run across the roofs of separate houses. Homogeneity of the parallel rows of identical houses is reinforced by the parallel highlights gleaming from the wet roofs. Brandt uses water to reinforce the sense that the world is impersonal. It separates individuals into discrete units, yet reduces these units to a common, faceless denominator. Yet, this regular sameness is punctuated by random laundry lines strung between homes. Thus, there is a suggestion of life, without evidence of such. Brandt transforms the common occurrence of drying laundry into something meaningful through his use of light and contrast.

"Policeman in Bermondsey" (Image 9) appeared first in A Night in London, and was reprinted in Lilliput (March, 1946) as part of the photo essay, "Below Tower Bridge." A lone constable stands at the end of a dark alley, silhouetted against the brighter street beyond him. The policeman is defined by shadow, not by reflected light. The stark contrast of this image reduces a black and white print to nearly pure shades of black and white. Brandt’s use of darkness produces an image suffused with a sense of treachery and danger. He creates a sense of isolation, alienation, and distrust: this lone policeman enforces the law because the bonds of community are insufficient to prevent crime.

"A Snicket in Halifax" and "Train Leaving Newcastle" are part of Brandt’s journey to the north in 1937. In the dialect of north-east England, a snicket is a narrow alley between buildings. (14) Brandt’s rendition of "A Snicket in Halifax" (Image 10) uses a contrasty printing technique which reduces this steep, cobbled alley to an almost geometrical form. Warburton comments,

Brandt printed the photograph with harsher black/white contrasts, eliminating much detail and intensifying the image’s metaphorical content: the steep cobbled pathway is not longer simply a record of how a place looked but rather a symbol for a way of life, the struggle uphill with the dark and sinister factory looming over everything. (15)

The sense of industrial oppression and alienation of the individual permeates this image. Similarly, in "Train Leaving Newcastle," (Image 11) Brandt prints out all detail in the silhouette of the bridge and the train, leaving a cut-out of industrial England. The sense is of a harsh, industrial world, populated by factories and billowing smokestacks, not human beings.

The images from the Cantor collection suggests that Brandt’s sense of atmosphere was realist and modern. He focuses on the alienation of the individual from his fellow humans, and the alienation of the individual laborer in the industrial factory setting. In a forward to the new book on Brandt’s photography, David Hockney argues, "The photographer must first have seen his subject, or some aspect of his subject, as something transcending the ordinary. It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do." (16) Yet, Brandt’s success as a photographer relies not only on his ability to perceive a certain sense of atmosphere, but to convey this sense to his audience.

Brandt is a great modern photographer because he is a true artist. He understood his subjects, and conveyed them in the most sympathetic light possible, while refusing to sentimentalize them. Throughout, Brandt also maintained a certain aesthetic sense within his body of work. The Cantor Center’s prints are sensitive; yet they evoke the feeling that he is presenting the true nature of his subjects, because he uses a grainy, contrasty printing style reminiscent of inter-war photojournalism. Through masterful use of light and contrast, Brandt can convey a sense of atmosphere which other photographers, bent on the poetic or artistic, fail to do. He reproduces not only what a place looked like, but also what it felt to be in that place at a particular moment in time. This ability to represent with sensitivity, and to convey his own feelings, marks Bill Brandt as one of the great photographers of recent time, and may well be the greatest photographer of English society in the 1930s.

Notes

(1) Nigel Warburton, "Authentic Photographs," British Journal of Aesthetics, v. 37, no. 2, April, 1997, p. 131. An American example of a photographer who continually reinterpreted his own work is Frederick Sommers, who never dated his prints, because he believed that each print was better than the last. (According to Joel Leivick, Senior Lecturer, Department of Art, Stanford University)

(2) Bill Brandt, "Bill Brandt’ [Statement], Album, no. 2, 1970, pp. 46-7.

(3) Mark Hayworth-Booth, Bill Brandt: Behind the Camera (1985), p. 6.

(4) Raymond Mortimer, introduction to The English at Home (1936), p. 6

(5) Hayworth-Booth, p. 7.

(6) Ibid., p. 8.

(7) Brandt, "Bill Brandt" [Statement]

(8) Hayworth-Booth, p. 32.

(9) Sean K. Smith, "Picture Post, 1938-1945: Social Reform and Images of Britain at War," unpublished dissertation, Stanford University, 1992, p. 308.

(10) Ibid.

(11) Ibid.

(12) Bill Jay, "Bill Brandt: A True But Fictional First Encounter" in Occam’s Razor: An Outside-In View of Contemporary Photography (1992), p. 73.

(13) Bill Brandt, "A Photographer’s London," introduction to A Camera in London (1948), pp. 9-19.

(14) According to the Oxford English Dictionary, 3rd Ed. (online)

(15) Warburton, p. 130

(16) David Hockney, foreword to The Photography of Bill Brandt (1999), p. 6

Bibliography

Brandt, Bill. "Bill Brandt" [Statement], Album, no. 2 (1970), pp. 46-7.

?. "A Photographer’s London," Camera in London.

London: Focal Press (1948), pp. 9-19.

?; Mortimer, Raymond. The English at Home.

London: Batesford (1936)

Hockney, David; Jay, Bill; Warburton, Nigel. The Photography of Bill Brandt.
New York: Harry N. Abrams (1999)

Jay, Bill. "Bill Brandt: A True but Fictional First Encounter,"
Occam’s Razor: An Outside-In View of Contemporary Photography.
Munich: Nazareli Press (1992), pp. 71-3.

Mellor, David; Hayworth-Booth, Mark. Bill Brandt: Behind the Camera.
New York: Aperture (1985)

Smith, Sean K. "Picture Post, 1938-1945: Social Reform and Images of Britain at War."
Unpublished dissertation, Stanford University, Department of History (1992)

Warburton, Nigel. "Authentic Photographs,"
British Journal of Aesthetics, v. 37, no. 2 (April, 1997), pp. 129-37.