Brandt, Bill 
(1904-1983)

1904. Bill Brandt was born in Hamburg to German parents of Russian descent. He was one of four brothers. His eldest brother, Walter, was an aviator (for the Allies) and was killed in action in WWII. His closest brother, Rolf became an illustrator & also eventually emigrated to London. His childhood years were spent mostly in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany and Davos, Switzerland.

1914. The outbreak of hostilities and WWI.

1920. Brandt contracted tuberculosis (TB) as a young man of 16, and as was the practice in those dark days, was packed off to a sanitarium in Davos to recover until he was 22 years old.

1926. He was finally pronounced cured and left the sanitarium to follow his brother Rolf to the bright lights of Vienna. He engineered an introduction to the wealthy Jewish educator and socialite Dr. Eugenie Schwarzwald, who decided that it was time for Brandt to find a job. Legend has it that as she ticked off a number of possibilities on her fingers, Brandt stopped her at photography. Schwarzwald arranged work in a portrait studio owned by her friend Greta Kolliner.

1928. Ezra Pound, the American poet, visited the Schwarzwalds. Bill Brandt was lucky enough to take is portrait which strangely remained unexhibited and unpublished until 1982. But the portrait was greatly admired by Ezra. As a consequence, Ezra saw to it that Brandt was introduced to the great surrealist painter and photographer, Man Ray. 

1929. Brandt left Vienna for Paris and worked for approximately 3 months in Man Ray's studio. He apparently received little instruction from Man Ray, but gained "a new excitement about photography and about the world as well" from the exposure. Brandt also assimilated the Parisian art of the period, such as the films of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali and the photographs of Eugene Atget, and Andre Kertesz. A fleeting trip to England inspired Brandt to photograph London and his earliest was one of the Caledonian Market in North London. He also produced some largely unseen images of the Paris flea market.

1932. Brandt had by now met Eva, his first of three wives. He travelled with her to Barcelona on a whirlwind romance and married in London in 1932. His home in Belsize Park, North London is an area renowned for intellectuals and artists. Typically, Brandt set up the darkroom in his small kitchen. 

1934. Becomes friends with French photographer Brassai, with whom he maintains a lifelong association.

1935. By this time he had enough material to publish his first book, The English at Home. The book was not a publishing success and was remaindered.

1936. Brandt visits the beaches in Normandy with Eva and meets the painter Braque. Back in London, Brandt also met Stefan Lorant, who as a refugee from the Nazis had started the British magazine Weekly Illustrated. In a short meeting in February, Brandt's potential was seen by both Lorant and by Tom Hopkinson, at that time the assistant editor.

1938. The success in France of Brassai's book Paris by Night, prompted publishers Arts Metiers Graphiques to publish Brandt's A Night in London, which showed the dark and melodramatic side of London. 

Brandt was starting to chronicle the life of the industrial towns hit by economic hardship in the north of England, photographing in the shipyards of Jarrow, the coal fields of Newcastle, the mills of Halifax and the potteries of Sheffield. He worked steadily for three magazines, Lilliput (founded 1937), Picture Post (founded 1938), and Harper's Bazaar. At Lilliput Brandt usually suggested and sequenced his own work.

1940. He started to photograph the blackout and in September 1940 was asked by the War Office to record the Blitz, Londoners sheltering from German air raids in Underground stations. During the Blitz two million houses were destroyed and 60,000 civilians killed, the majority living in London.

Brandt makes his first big splash in the USA with a spread for LIFE magazine.

1941. The National Buildings Record asked him to photograph endangered buildings around the country. Citizen Kane, one of the most influential films for Brandt, premiered in New York, although Brandt is unlikely to have seen it until later in the year.

1945. British film director Alfred Hitchcock makes the film Spellbound for which artist Salvador Dalí designs a surreal dream sequence. This may have been somewhat of an influence as Brandt produced his own dream sequence around this time. 

1946. Brandt began his postwar portrait work with Lilliput and Picture Post and started photographing notable British artists, continuing his work in the 1950's with a series of portraits of international artists for Harper's Bazaar.

1946. Lilliput started to publish the first of his nudes.

1949. Camera in London was published, collecting his pictures from the 1930's and 1940's and adding Brandt's own essays on photography.

1945-50. By this time landscape photography had become a passion. Some of his best was published in Literary Britain in 1951. Brandt scoured the country for houses of major British literary figures.

The nude was increasingly taking up his time. In a fusion of literary landscape and nude, Brandt concentrated on a series of outdoor nudes taken on the beaches of Normandy and Sussex during the 1950s.

1961. Brandt's monolithic series of nudes were finally published in Perspective of Nudes, both in London and New York. 

Brandt's nudes also appear in his book Shadow of Light, a retrospective survey of the different phases of his career. For both editions of the book Brandt printed older and newer photographs alike in a distinctively stark, high-contrast style that eliminates most soft, gray details, a style that was to become his signature.

1969. New York City's Museum of Modern Art, under the direction of Edward Steichen, and arranged by John Szarkowski, presented Brandt's first retrospective containing 124 prints specially made for exhibit. Reviews were glowing.

1970. The first Brandt Retrospective was launched at London's Hayward Gallery.

1972. Brandt joined the Marlborough Gallery, who remained responsible for the international appreciation and sale of his work until his death.

1976. Marlborough Gallery's New York and London branches both mounted comprehensive solo shows of Brandt's work. Brandt continued to live and work in Kensington, London preparing a series of signed larger prints specifically for Marlborough Gallery collectors.

1978. Brandt was named a Royal Designer for Industry by The Royal Society of Arts.

1979. The Royal Photographic Society awarded Brandt its Silver Progress Medal.

1981. The Royal Photographic Society inaugurated its National Centre of Photography in Bath with an exhibition of 50 years of Brandt's pictures. His work has also been honored by a score of smaller shows. in such far-flung cities as Paris, Stockholm, San Francisco, Houston, Boston, and Washington DC. Brandt's photos are also considered important by London's Victoria and Albert Museum, New York's MoMA, Rochester's International Museum of Photography, and Paris' Bibliotheque Nationale, which all have major collections of his prints. 

1983. Brandt died in December after a short illness and suffering from diabetes for over 40 years. He left Noya his wife and no children. His ashes are scattered in Holland Park which he used to visit almost every day.

PORTRAITS
Text from Bill Brandt: Behind the Camera 

Although Bill Brandt's career began, decisively, with his close-up portrait of Ezra Pound in 1928, his subject in the 30's was the social portrait and the urban setting. An exception is a dramatic head of his brother Rolf, lit in the style of expressionist cinema, from the mid-30's. Brandt's portraiture flowered in the 40's. Its hallmarks are seriousness, reticence and, despite some spectacular exceptions, a circumambience perhaps best described In the words of Elizabeth Bowen: "a tense bright dusk." Brandt portrayed artists and thinkers thoughtfully and in isolation. He rarely photographed politicians or businessmen. It is possible that as a young man in Vienna he may have known something of the activities of the art historian Heinrich Schwarz (of the Képferstich Kabinett), who was then in the midst of his exciting rediscovery of the calotypes of Hill and Adamson from the 1840's. The appearance of Brandt's photograph of Caledonian Market (1929) in the pages of Das Deutches Lichtbild in 1932 coincided with the publication in the same volume of an article by the Austrian art photographer Heinrich Kuhn titled "The Photographic Mastery of Extreme Light and Shade." Kuhn argued for manipulation of chiaroscuro in the interests of expression. The human eye, he wrote, is constructed in such a way that "high lights always become blended with shadows and... the action of the iris and other physiological processes cooperate to bring extreme contrasts closer together." Such physiological processes must be understood by "real photographers, who know how to portray atmosphere and mood convincingly and who have a message to deliver to the soul of man." Kuhn opposed a photography which offered merely mechanical renderings of tone gradations. He celebrated instead the achievements of David Octavius Hill, whose "powerful expressionism of the Talbotype/Calotype... led him to the decisively characteristic outline of draughtsmanship." Brandt contrived, in his portrait of E.M. Forster (1947), something of the shadowed luxuriance of calotype and later wrote of his intentions in Camera in London (1948): 

When photographing a writer, I was forcibly impressed by the Victorian character of the room in which he sat. A hard print brought out this impression. Details were lost as they were in early Victorian photographs. My print did not imitate those old photographs; the methods of printing simply formed a link of association between the two, adding its reminiscent effect to the Victorian setting.

In this period Brandt consistently used the Rolleiflex camera which emerged on the photographic scene along with Brandt in 1928. The camera's ground-glass provided a clear view of the subject and the 2 1/4 x 2 1/4-inch negative gave Brandt the latitude he required for darkroom work. Brandt intensified or lightened his prints, cropped and retouched - sometimes drastically - and experimented tirelessly to achieve the veiled chiaroscuro tones typical of his photographs at this time. His serious portraiture began with a feature for Lilliput in December 1941. "Young Poets of Democracy," with text by Stephen Spender, presented Brandt's new portraits of Spender, C. Day Lewis, Dylan Thomas, Louis MacNeice, Alun Lewis, Anne Ridler, Laurie Lee and William Empson - representatives of both the Auden Generation and the poets in reaction to them, whom Cyril Connolly named the "new romantics." Brandt and his wife Eva, who published a remarkable novel called The Mermaids in 1956, regularly read John Lehmann's New Writing. Tom Hopkinson kept them in touch with interesting developments elsewhere, notably in Horizon where his own Stories were achieving acclaim. Composers were photographed in 1946 and visual artists in 1948. In November 1949, Lilliput published "A Gallery of Literary Artists": E.M. Forster, Norman Douglas, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Robert Graves, Edith and Osbert Sitwell, Elizabeth Bowen, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene. Brandt's portrait series for Lilliput closed in November 1949 with "The Box Office Boys" - the theatre producers of London's West End. This was an unlikely subject for him but times were changing. This phase of his portraiture came suddenly to an end when, in October 1949, Tom Hopkinson was forced out of the editorship of Picture Post. Many years later Sir Tom Hopkinson, as he became, speaking of the photojournalist Donald McCullin, said that a photographer of this caliber was akin to a thoroughbred racehorse and should be handled with great sensitivity by the responsible editor. As Bill Brandt's editor, Hopkinson always used another "thoroughbred" with discernment. At American Harper's Bazaar, the editor Carmel Snow gave Brandt similar encouragement and support in the later 40's and into the 50's. Brandt's early portraiture omits one individual, not exactly a writer and not usually described as a visual artist, whose oeuvre seems to have some say in the amply shadowed apartments in which we find so many of Brandt's sitters. In 1982 the present writer noted the omission in conversation with Bill Brandt: "Ah, Hitchcock, I would love to have photographed him. It could never be arranged. I had even chosen the exact spot. It was to have been at Charing Cross Underground Station. There is an amazingly long empty corridor that looks as if it goes right under the river. That is where I wanted to photograph him." A second and distinct period of portrait photography began in the late 50's. Brandt's later portrait interpretations are expressed through the use of the Superwide Hasselblad. The 90 degree angle of the lens was exactly right for Brandt's portrait interiors. For outdoor pictures it allowed Brandt to calculate the composition of his three-quarter length study of Francis Bacon and to include the sweeping lamp-lit perspective of Primrose Hill in Camden Town, London. The high-energy vanishing lines and the high-contrast printing style Brandt then adopted gave the later portraits an abrasive edge dissimilar to the earlier portraits and highly typical of the 60's. Brandt continued to take portrait assignments until 1981 and in that year added a final series to the pantheon of the creative individuals he particularly admired. 


Quotes 

"I am not interested in rules or conventions. Photography is not a sport. If I think a picture will look better brilliantly lit, I use lights, or even flash. It is the result that counts, no matter how it was achieved."