PHOTOGRAPHY: STUDY AND ANALYSIS

The dream-world and the surreal is totally removed from the progressive aims of mainstream photojournalism.

 

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 defense was to extinguish every glimmer of light, in the hope that German bombers might lose themselves in a vast, featureless expanse.

London became a surrealist tableau

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.