PHOTOGRAPHY: STUDY AND ANALYSIS
Beauty displayed as a male possession
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. To exploit
fully the possibilities of deep focus, Brandt took a step backwards in camera
technology and began working with a Kodak wide angle: "It had a fixed focus,
no shutter, and could take a complete panorama of a room with a single
exposure. I learned that the camera had been used at the beginning of the
century by auctioneers, for photographic inventories, and by Scotland Yard for
police records. It was fascinating to watch the effect of the lens which
created a great illusion of space, and an unrealistically steep perspective,
and soon I discovered that it could produce fantastic anatomical images which
I had never seen before. " In many of Brandt's 1940s nudes, the model locks
eyes with the observer, but her gaze is hard to read. Her mood may be sullen
or even threatening; what she never conveys is seductiveness. Perhaps tired or
dissatisfied, she always wants to keep herself emotionally at a distance. Two
of the traditional qualities of the female nude are lacking: sexual
availability, and beauty displayed as a male possession. Brandt's aims for his
indoor nudes of the 1950s can be seen most clearly in his Belgravia
photographs - those taken in the Eaton Place flat that Eva moved to after she
and Brandt separated. His first Eaton Place nude (1951) shows a woman's
crossed legs - they may be Marjorie's - seen from the head. It belongs with
two other pictures that feature the French doors of the flat, opening on to a
balcony, and a Victorian spoon-backed chair. One is the Eaton Place Still Life
that had been Brandt's farewell present to Eva in 1948, the other is the
Portrait Of A Young Girl of 1955, for which Rolf's 10-year-old daughter Judith
was the model. In all three pictures, the chair seems to be a surrogate for
Eva herself, absent from her flat while Brandt does his work. The deep-focus
portrait of Judith makes her into an uncanny, Alice-like figure - perhaps the
ghost of the child that Eva and Bill could never have.