PHOTOGRAPHY

 

In spring 1938, Eva Brandt became friendly with a fellow TB patient at one of her sanatoriums, Marjorie Beckett. She brought Marjorie to London to meet Brandt, or perhaps sent her there with an introduction. Eva's idea was that Marjorie was too shy, and needed to be drawn out socially. But she also thought that if she was unable to be in London herself, then "Billy shouldn't be alone". And if he was going to have someone else, better that it should be someone Eva already liked. When Marjorie and Bill promptly fell in love, it was, on some level, what Eva expected and even wanted - though she clung to the belief that she would always be the most important woman in Brandt's life, whatever happened. When he met Marjorie, Brandt had been a photographer for 10 years without paying much attention to women as subjects. He had done some pleasing but derivative nudes in the style of Man Ray, using Eva as his model; and there were some vivid staged pictures using his sister-in-law, Ester Brandt.

 

But his fascination with Marjorie led to a much bigger project of staging pictures, probably in the winter of 1939-40. Brandt took multiple shots and linked them into a narrative, publishing seven of them as Nightwalk: A Dream Phantasy In Photographs in the American magazine Coronet. Nightwalk begins with Marjorie asleep in bed and ends with her waking up. In between is a dream sequence of five pictures in which she wanders through hallways and staircases in her dressing gown, carrying a Jack Russell, and meets a sinister figure played by Brandt's brother Rolf. She sleeps in a divan bed in Brandt's living room. In the darkroom, Brandt montaged into the window a full moon and a roofscape with two chimneys, as in a scene from Robert Wiene's The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari (1920). This classic of German expressionist cinema supplies the nightmare atmosphere, the theme of somnambulism and the threatening madman - Rolf wears a Caligari-style stovepipe hat. But Brandt's central idea, of female vulnerability, is only a subplot in Caligari. Although the sequence is presented as a woman's fantasy, the viewer doesn't see events through her eyes. Instead, we see what a male spectator would see and, on some level, enjoy: a half-dressed woman threatened with unspeakable acts of violation.

There is nothing openly pornographic in Brandt's scenes, yet a sadistic imagination seems to be at work, one that is excited by the woman's fear. The intensity of Brandt's fantasies about Marjorie can be measured by the amount of work he did on manipulating the pictures. In its elaborate artifice and libidinal themes, Nightwalk belongs entirely to the dream-world and the surreal, and is totally removed from the progressive aims of mainstream photojournalism. It was the prelude to his major phase of involvement with the female nude, which began later in the war. He liked to say that his nudes were his most important work; if so, it was his passion for Marjorie Beckett that set him on that path. At the outbreak of war, London was under siege and the city's first defence was to extinguish every glimmer of light, in the hope that German bombers might lose themselves in a vast, featureless expanse.