Bill Brandt’s ‘familiar yet strange’ work on show at MoMA

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Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light

By Sarah Hermanson Meister and Lee Ann Daffner

 ‘Familar and yet strange’ is how Bill Brandt (1904–83) referred to his work in the introduction to his book Camera in London, published in 1948.  Bill Brandt was born Hermann Wilhelm Brandt in Hamburg in 1904. In reference books he is often classified as a member of the British Neo-Romantic movement of the 1930s–’50s.  He came from a successful and cosmopolitan shipping and banking family.  His father was born in London and by the mid 1930s, Bill Brandt had also settled there.  Before that he had served as an apprentice in a photographic studio in Vienna in the late 1920s and then with the surrealist Man Ray in Paris in the early 1930s, when he made ‘Losing at Horse Races’.

The exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, like the accompanying publication, is divided into six thematic sections:  London in the Thirties; Northern England; World War II; Portraits: Landscapes; and Nudes, a way of looking at his work that Brandt himself preferred.  The main essay is by Sarah Hermanson Meister and it sets the photographer's life and work in the context of 20th-century photographic history, while Lee Ann Daffner contributes an illustrated glossary of Brandt's retouching techniques, within a discussion of his printing techniques.

Brandt's ability to live in London was fortunate. A photographer looking to make his name in early to mid-1930s Paris had stiff competition:  Brassai, André Kértész, Germaine Krull, Henri Cartier-Bresson, to name a few.  The great example before them was Eugène Atget, whose work was studied by them all.  They were all seeking jobs for the illustrated press and Brandt's decision to settle in London allowed him not only to sidestep this competition but also to transform what he'd learned in Paris into his own work.

By the 1940s Brandt was a regular contributor to the English illustrated press but his family's comfortable circumstances also allowed him some freedom in being able to choose what he did.  He published his first book, The English at Home, in 1936, and his second, A Night in London, in 1938.  Pictures such as ‘Kensington Children's Party’ and ‘Parlourmaid Preparing Bath’ are from these years.  (The parlourmaid was employed by his uncle and he used her many times in posed photos.)

The decade between the publication of A Night in London and that of Camera in London was the peak period of Brandt's work for the illustrated press and coincided with the Second World War.  See for example 'Bombed Regency Staircase' of c.1942. In her essay, Meister comments that by the mid-1940s Brandt had begun to explore the ‘poetic’ potential of photography and she refers to his identification of Man Ray and Edward Weston as the leaders of this ‘school’.  She remarks that Brandt may have held this view because both made impressive nude photographs before the war and this was the direction that Brandt's work was to take.

Portraits (see the portrait of Dubuffet), the English landscape and an intense series of photographs of the nude in unusual settings (‘London’, 1954 and ‘Seaford, East Sussex Coast’), made up his work from the late 1940s into the 1960s.  In the publication introduction, Meister says of these nudes:

With the publication of Perspective of Nudesin 1961, he defied preconceived notions of the genre with his choice of settings (inhospitably barren seashores or prim Victoria interiors that conflated the domestic and the sexual in lieu of sterile, but safe, studios), as well as the extreme exaggeration of his distortions, cropping, and printing styles, rendering what might otherwise have been hopeless cliched aspects of the female form unfamiliar and surprising.

It is Brandt’s printing styles that have come in for a lot of comment over the years.  Toward the end of his life, Brandt printed his early negatives in the style that he had adopted much later in his  career, which has made understanding his work something of a challenge.  The brooding, atmospheric printing of his photos from the 1930s has little in common with that of the high contrast nudes from the 1950s, but he would nevertheless print the older negatives in the same fashion as those from the 1950s.  The Museum of Modern Art has set out to replace many of the prints in its collection, which were made in 1959, with vintage prints of his early work, a project they're still working on but which they use in the exhibition to good effect.

And that is one of the major reasons for this exhibition and the publication: a revaluation of the artist's career, not just from the point of view of his subject matter, but also as a close examination of his methods, in an attempt to explain how someone who could produce such wistful photography as Brandt did in the mid-1930s, could come to create such bold and unpredictable work as ‘Seaford East Sussex’ in the 1950s.

Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light  by Sarah Hermanson Meister and Lee Ann Daffneris published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2013. Outside the USA and Canada it is distributed by Thames & Hudson.208 pp., 254 tritone illus, $50 hardback. ISBN 9780870708459