Brandt went to Vienna in 1926 after recovering from T.B. and six years in a sanatorium.

He was introduced to photography in the studio of Greta Kolliner making portraits, eventually meeting Ezra Pound who was impressed with his work and arranged for Brandt to meet Man Ray in Paris in 1928.

Brandt worked in Ray’s studio for some “three months, receiving little instruction”[a] but absorbing the excitement of the intellectual and artistic ferment that was Paris in the twenties.

He became friends with Brassai and met others of the Surrealist movement and it is this influence, I think, forms the basis of his subsequent thoughts on art and its inter-relationship with photography. He had also become aware of the works of Eugene Atget.

Surrealism took over from the “Dada movement’s nihilistic hostility to rationalism and….. added Freudian theory, trying to grasp elements of the unconscious and expressing the surfaced thoughts with symbols appropriate to their unconscious feeling.” [b]

“Thus it was I found atmosphere to be the spell that charged the commonplace with beauty. And I am still not sure what atmosphere is. I would be hard put to define it. I only know 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 yet strange. I doubt whether atmosphere, in the meaning it has for me, can be conveyed by a picture of something which is quite unfamiliar to the beholder” (Brandt) [c]

By 1932 Brandt had married and moved to London to an area, Belsize Park, which had more than its share of artists and intellectuals and started working for the popular magazine, “Weekly Illustrated” a journal started by Stefan Lorant, a refugee from Nazism.

Brandt also had regular assignments from 1937 for the magazine “Lilliput”, and from 1938 “Picture Post” as well as “Harpers Bazaar”.[d]

Brandt always had private income and was independent from the need to work, was well connected, and maintained interest in theatre, literature, poetry and film. Perhaps it was this social confidence allied with his surrealist bent that could allow him to stand back from his adopted country and produce the early works that started making his name.

“The English at Home” a study in the class boundaries and social extremes of English society still has critics arguing over his perceived socialist sensibility.

Many of these shots though looking “documentary” were “set-ups”, maids from his uncles London home, his brothers lurking in gloomy alleys, his wife pretending to be a burlesque performer or prostitute (unlike Brassai who photographed the reality in Paris).

Brandt’s natural reticence, “good manners”, his awareness of the social mores of the time or even perhaps his understanding of being a foreigner were probably part of his visual attitude and how he dealt with subjects at this time. He was in fact, constructing reality.

When war broke out in 1939 he was sharing an office at the Ministry of Information with the sculptor Henry Moore and both decided that propaganda was not their metier and would do what they wanted to, not all of what the Ministry demanded.

The series of images that both produced of Londoners sheltering in the Underground, in church crypts and particularly Brandt’s views of moonlit London in the blackout were important not only for the aesthetic development of both artists careers but in establishing the correspondence between art practices that will bear fruit twenty years on.

“In 1939, at the beginning of the war, I was back in London photographing the blackout. The darkened town, lit only by moonlight, looked more beautiful than before or since. I t was fascinating to walk through the deserted streets and photograph houses which I knew well, and which no longer looked three-dimensional, but flat like painted stage scenery……………..” (Brandt) [c]

Brandt’s, “Bloomsbury 1942” has all the disturbing resonance of a De Chirico.

He also had his first publication in the U.S. with the blitz pictures in “Life”.

Following the war his style changed dramatically. “I think I gradually lost my enthusiasm for reportage. Besides my main theme of the past few years had disappeared; England was no longer a country of marked social contrast…it seemed to me that there were wide fields still unexplored. I began to photograph nudes, portraits and landscapes”. [e]

“One day in a second-hand shop, near Covent Garden, I found a 70-year-old wooden Kodak. I was delighted. Like C19th cameras it had no shutter, and the wide-angle-lens, with an aperture as minute as a pinhole, was focused at infinity. In 1926, Edward Weston wrote in his diary, “ The camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?” My new camera saw more and saw it differently. It created a great illusion of space, an unrealistically steep perspective, and it distorted. When I began to photograph nudes, I let myself be guided by this camera, and instead of photographing what I saw, I photographed what the camera was seeing. I interfered very little, and the lens produced anatomical images and shapes which my eyes had never observed. I felt that I understood what Orson Welles meant when he said that … “the camera is much more than a recording apparatus. It is a medium via which messages reach us from another world” (Brandt)[c]

The journey Brandt is now undertaking with the nudes has that meaning of “purely psychic automatism” that Breton defined as surreal, is one that will go on for more than forty years. As his reputation increases, due in great deal, to the perceptive portraits of artists that were widely published and also his return to a “Romantic” landscape which visually re-discovers Britain’s past, the nudes develop as a stylistically separate form that owes much to his understanding of art and the contemporary conceptual thinking of many artists.

I’m not in the least suggesting that Brandt copied but on viewing many of his images it is hard to escape the “flavour” many have and I think that as a sensitive, aware and analytic artist he was making in photography aesthetic equivalents to those artists around him that he knew and whose work and ideas he admired.

London 1940’s

Balthus “Woman at the Mirror”1948

An enigmatic, brooding, classically composed image, dealing with shape as much as form and using these as metaphor for another reality. It is worth noting that Brandt acknowledged a debt to Balthus’ drawings illustrating “Wuthering Heights” in his landscape photographs “Top Withens” 1945.

Micheldever 1945

Giacometti “Hand” 1947

Brandt may have met Giacometti in Paris in the twenties. Again, the statement of surrealist realities are pulsing with meanings … is it an offering, an acceptance or a demand? Of what? The print as object, the model as object?

Campden Hill 1953

Lee Friedlander Nude, 1978

Hmmm, I must say I do prefer the clarity of intent in Brandt.

Baie des Anges 1959

Henry Moore Reclining Figure 1934

Moore spent time looking for natural forms on the English coastline, stones, shells, bones and the such-like that he replicated in his sculptures… again the use by both of equivalents for other meanings.

Brandt’s book “Perspective of Nudes” (1961) did not go over well outside Europe with American critics panning the quality of the prints, possibly being too enmeshed in the “right” way of presentation a la Ansel Adams. In short, his prints were so “damaged” they didn’t feel they could market him but with photographers like Robert Frank, Ralph Gibson, Eikoh Hosoe & Duane Michals- acknowledging their debt to his imagery Brandt has made a lasting impact on nude photography.

The sexuality of his works is obvious and his conjugal relations more so but his restraint is as obvious too; he was making art not doing a show-and-tell and even though some later pieces were heading into bondage and sado-masochism the inherent qualities I find are those of the search for, as he put it “…the simple pleasure of seeing”.

Brandt appreciated the artifice of life and the intersecting of experience which created opportunity for new visions.

© 2004 Lawrence Winder - not to be republished without express written permission.

Sources

A/ Timesonline

B/Concise History of Art, Germain Bazin, Thames & Hudson

C/ Brandt, Thames & Hudson

D/ Creative Camera Owner Magazine 1970

E/ The Naked Eye, David Bailey & Martin Harrison. Amphoto 1987

Illustrations

Brandt, Thames & Hudson

Balthus, Giovanni Caradente, Thames & Hudson

Giacometti, MOMA.

American Century of Photography, Hallmark Collection.

Sculpture, Taschen

The Shock of the New, Robert Hughes, BBC.