'The New York Times'The pre-eminent British photographer of the 20th century, Bill Brandt, took pictures whose balance of art and humanity is frequently called strange, mysterious and irresistible. The best induce us to pore over them, exploring their psychology as much as their form, their implied narratives as much as their brooding blacks or parsimonious whites, their connections to the history of art as much as their documentary realism. Brandt himself wrote in 1948 that he admired photography's power to make people see the world anew, to experience it with "a sense of wonder."
"Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light" at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City is the latest chance to experience the several varieties of Brandtian wonder and defamiliarizing strangeness. Organized with sharp acumen by Sarah Hermanson Meister, a MoMA photography curator, it presents nearly 160 vintage prints and related material, including examples of the illustrated magazines that published Brandt's work starting in the mid-1930s. All told the show provides a sweeping view of Brandt's sensibility, his wide-ranging subject matter, his obsession with the printing process as an essential part of the photographer's art and his ability to function creatively even when on assignment
Following the trajectory suggested by its title, the show begins with the often penumbral images - not unlike Seurat's charcoa drawings - of British life that he took in the 1930s and during World War II. It ends with his surrealist, relatively light-bathed images of female nudes from the 1950s and '60s, in which exaggerated viewpoints render bodies, and parts of bodies, nearly unrecognizable if not abstract, like smooth biomorphic sculptures worthy of Brancusi or Arp.
The achievements of Brandt (1904-83) are not as firmly fixed in the mind as those of his contemporaries and artistic equals: Walker Evans (1903-75) is known for the consummate lucidity of his images of sharecroppers and weathered Southern architecture. Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908-2004), master of the hand-held Leica, captured people in elegantly composed "decisive moments."
Brandt was interested in neither. His pictures can be so dark that it takes a while to know what's what, and they tend toward stillness . (He worked for the most part with a Rolleiflex box camera on a tripod.) More than a visual style, his photographs have a kind of atmosphere, an emotional depth, a sense of human vulnerability that extends even to the city views and landscapes, and that expands in several directions as you study the pictures.
Some, like those of London parlormaids on duty in starchy white aprons over black dresses, seem quintessentially of the moment, made for black-and-white film and rife11 with social tension. Others, though hardly without such commentary, oscillate stylistically in time.
Brandt was not beyond ambiguity himself. His desire to be seen as an English photographer recording his homeland led him to obscure the fact that it was an adopted one. When he died in 1983, more than one obituary said he was born in England, though he was actually born in Hamburg to a family of wealthy German bankers and shippers. He suffered from tuberculosis as a teenager, prompting his parents to send him to Swiss sanitariums where enforced rest enabled him to dabble in12 photography.
In 1927 he went to Vienna, seeking a psychoanalytic cure for his disease and ended up working as a photographer's assistant. He had found his art, although it wasn't yet clear where he would pursue it.
In 1929 he settled in Paris for five crucial years, making periodic trips through Europe with a camera and friends. He worked briefly as an assistant to the American photographer, painter and Surrealist Man Ray, taking to heart both his sensibility and his freewheeling13 darkroom techniques.
By 1934 Brandt was in England to stay. He soon established himself with two books, "The English at Home" (1936) and, with a nod to Brassai "A Night in London" (1938).
Divided into six sections, the MoMA show gives an excellent account of the sheer variety of Brandt's subject matter. He portrayed distinctly different levels of the British class system: from grave, besooted Northumbrian miners to those uniformed parlormaids to wealthy Londoners playing backgammon in a Mayfair drawing room. He roamed London's streets and parks and, during the Blitz the crowded underground stations where people sought shelter, sleeping cheek to jowl, and where he made some of his best-known images. The London blackout played to his love of darkness. He also explored the gritty industrial towns in the north of England, like Halifax and Jarrow, shrouded in Dickensian gloom , and he took to the open countryside to capture images of Hadrian's Wall, Stonehenge and a ruined farmhouse on the edge of a windswept moor that is thought to have figured in Emily Bronte's "Wuthering Heights."
He made portraits of sculptors, actors and literary notables, and in 1960 zeroed in on the eyes - sometimes the left, sometimes the right - of distinguished, rather ancient artists (among them Jean Dubuffet, Louise Nevelson, Jean Arp and Alberto Giacometti), resulting in extreme close-ups of organs of sight surrounded by leathery, sagging skinthat are beyond gender, race and even species. And finally there are the so-called nudes, the surprise ending of an already illustrious career and potent latecomers to the history of surrealism.
Considered his greatest achievement, these are perhaps the most mysterious of all Brandt's work. In some, like "Belgravia, London" - in which a woman's legs loom up from the bottom of the image, and a foot hooked over the other knee presents a drastically elongated calf - the picture might almost have been taken by the woman herself.
Both the show and catalog demonstrate the single-mindedness of Brandt's artistry. Many of his seemingly documentary images were posed. His wealthier subjects were often family members or friends; Pratt, the dark-haired parlormaid he frequently photographed, worked for his uncle. When shooting on assignment, he tended to retain the best images for himself: The portrait of Robert Graves that appeared in a 1941 issue of Picture Post shows a young man focused on his work; the one from the same session that Brandt held back shows the poet looking more mature, a quill pen clasped between his teeth and a slightly mad, oracular gleam in his eye.