PHOTOGRAPHY

 

The most dangerous nights were those of clear weather and a full moon, when London became a spectral and deserted city - vulnerable to destruction from the air. On such nights, Brandt set out to explore an urban environment that had not existed since the introduction of gas street lighting more than 100 years before. "The glamorous make-up of the world's largest city faded with the lights," Brandt wrote in Camera In London in 1948. "Under the soft light of the moon the blacked-out town had a new beauty. The houses looked flat like painted scenery and the bombed ruins made strangely shaped silhouettes." London became a surrealist tableau. In November 1940, the new Ministry of Information commissioned Brandt to make a comprehensive record of shelter life, and he went out every night for a week visiting tube shelters, church crypts, railway arches and private cellars. His task was a kind of reversal of the moonlight pictures of 1939: instead of standing outside in deserted moonlit streets, he worked in confined, crowded spaces, dependent on artificial light. In December 1941, Lilliput magazine turned Brandt's career in a new direction by publishing Young Poets Of Democracy, a series of eight portraits he had taken over the previous year and a half. Brandt had started with portraits in the Vienna studio style: close-up head shots with stark lighting and plain background (designed to make the subject look like "someone special"). Once in England, more free from commercial restrictions, Brandt was drawn to subjects who were given dignity by their place in the world, rather than by individual force of character. He took portraits regularly for the next 40 years. Part of the reason for doing them was economic, but Brandt would accept commissions only to take people who were in some way creative: writers, musicians, painters, actors and film directors.

The series of poets for Lilliput reveals a characteristic Brandtian quality of remoteness in his sitters. They seem to be surrounded by a glass bell, impervious to any gaze from outside. His portraits of continental artists, effective as they may be as likenesses, lack the cumulative effect of the parade of English culture-heroes who passed before his lens. These appear as members of a distinct national family, yet each also set apart in lonely self-containment. Cyril Connolly described Brandt's portrait of Francis Bacon as "a symbol of the despair of his generation". It is certainly a quintessential Brandt portrait, with Bacon's haunted look matched by what he does not see behind him: the ominous trees on the skyline, the path in an impossible perspective, the leaning lamp-post seemingly transported from a German expressionist film. Does it matter that Bacon himself hated the picture? John Berger has argued that Brandt's portraits of artists and writers "romanticise all the sitters in the name of art, establishing the superiority of the private reality". They also might be criticised for their unrelieved melodrama. Many use low-angle shots in the Citizen Kane style, turning their subjects into looming, ominous figures. Yet for Brandt's artists, writers or actors, solemn expressions are not just a cliché: repeatedly, he captures the depressive element in them, showing the despair that always stalks the perfectionist. As the war neared its end, Brandt took up the work for which he most wanted to be remembered: his studies of the female nude. English photographers had contributed little to the genre: it was not even clear what an English nude would look like. The originality of Brandt's nudes begins with his passion for technical innovation. Nudity itself often seems less important to him than the formal possibilities of photographing a figure in a room. Brandt's inspiration here did not come from earlier masters of nude photography, but from the many inventions of the most important film in his life, Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. In a documentary made at the end of his life, Brandt summed up Kane's impact: "When Citizen Kane was first shown, I'd never seen a film in which real rooms were used and you could see everything, the ceiling, and terrific perspective, it was all there. It was quite revolutionary, Citizen Kane, and I was very much inspired by it and I thought: 'I must take photographs like that.' " And so he left behind the conventions of 1930s social documentary.