article

Bill Brandt: modernist lover

One feels a certain ambivalence after seeing Bill Brandt: A Retrospective, now at the Yale Center for British Art (YCBA). Brandt is the creator of some of the most iconic photographs of the 20th century, arguably unrivaled in British photography in terms of popularity and influence.

BY GEORGE WEINBERG

He dealt with a wide range of subject matter, turning from reportage to the nude and landscape later in his life. His photographs are beautifully printed dynamic compositions of man at work and at play in the city, of men who have shaped history, and of the landscape that surrounds us. But how one wishes for a little more daring and panache, or even clumsiness. The retrospective begs the question of how much risk Brandt ever took.

Brandt's later photographs of female nudes—often distorted and warped by the camera lens—have generally been associated with surrealism. They are considered his most innovative work and are his best known. His photographs of curled-up torsos on the East Sussex beach have the look of Henry Moore sculptures. "Nude, London" from 1953, one of my favorites in this style, depicts a woman's bust, her face obscured by an impossibly elongated arm. The work in this style, constituting a fair share of the 155 vintage prints, follows from his earlier reportage photography in and about London. Something has been lost in these pictures, however, that Brandt's earlier work had in spades.

"See the subject first," Brandt once said, "the subject will reveal itself." Such an idea is apparent in his photographs of miners, poor families, and of Londoners in bomb shelters during World War II. The photographs are beautiful and engaging; the subjects are pitiable to an almost unbearable degree. While revealing a degree of struggle on Brandt's part to create a balanced but dynamic composition, they profess a heroic faith in the camera's ability to capture and convey emotion. "Man & Woman in Pub, Soho," from the '40s, captures an essence of the two subjects with clarity. The photograph also provides a tension in that their interaction is indeed frozen, suggesting what the moment withholds, and what an image of any particular moment refuses to yield. Brandt's reportage style reveals the uncanny and hints at a deeper, unnamable psychological meaning that is greater than what any one subject can embody.

This is the quality that Brandt's later work lacks—when it approaches the "surreal" quality of the everyday too directly. One senses that just as Brandt started to master a subtle and sophisticated approach, his boredom drove him to experimentation. I guess we cannot blame him for this, but as the retrospective bears out, it is disappointing.

The exhibition makes up for this somewhat by the sheer quality of the prints, some of which have pencil and pen highlighting by Brandt. The vintage prints are more subtle and have less severe contrast than later prints. The exhibition also contains a large showing of portraiture, of the likes of Ezra Pound, Dylan Thomas, Francis Bacon, Jean Arp, Georges Braque, and Peter Sellers. Unlike the New Yorker's Richard Avedon—a kind of modern-day equivalent—Brandt let his subject's surroundings help speak for who they were.

The masters of modern photography are both too easy and too difficult to look at. Their facility and proud faith in the medium's abilities are seductive. Brandt offers this kind of visually engaging photograph. At its best, the work expresses both vitality and the skepticism about socio-political relations that runs through much of quintessentially modern art.

At its very best, as with most great art, the work expresses this through the way the picture is made. But more often than not, Brandt seemed to have been resting too easily on his laurels or trying too hard to capture what his earlier work spoke to subtly, albeit a little too subtly.