Authored Images

Bill Brandt's beautifully composed photographs of Britain, showing its extremes of poverty and affluence made him little money during his lifetime. This week they go on sale for thousands.

Joseph Dunn - Sunday Times Magazine 16 March 2003

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Nothing was quite as it seemed with Bill Brandt. The greatest British photographer since Fox Talbot was in fact born and brought up in Germany, and in later life attended elocution lessons to mask his accent. A man of privileged background, he did more than most to highlight the inequalities of the English class system, and, as an artist, he used photography at a time when it was seen as the poor relation of all other art forms. But some of his most powerful images, such as those documenting social deprivation, were, strictly speaking, fictitious, featuring not real-life subjects but friends, family and paid extras.

Brandt's legacy is anything but obscure. "He was the one person who anyone with ambition measured themselves against from the 1950s," says Mark Haworth-Booth of the Victoria and Albert Museum. "There was no one who could come close to him".

Brandt's career began in Paris in 1929, studying with Man Ray, and ended with his death in 1983. His influence can still be seen in the work of photographers as diverse as Eve Arnold, Don McCullin and Terry O'Neill, and artists such as Francis Bacon and David Hockney.

It wasn't simply in artistic circles that Brandt's black-and-white images resonated. I His early assignments in the industrial north for Picture Post and Lilliput magazines, and his first book in 1936, The English at Home, which juxtaposed images of privilege and wealth with belowstairs working-class reality, also created a powerful portrait of social injustice that was to be a visual reference point for the politics of the post-war consensus.

There was hardly an area of photography that Brandt did not master. Haworth-Booth says he was more "three-dimensional" than other photographers. "He did landscape, social deprivation, surrealist, nudes and portraits he was always incredibly busy"

During the war, Brandt worked for the Ministry of Information and captured some of the most memorable pictures of Londoners during the Blitz. But his genius did not make him much money during his lifetime. In 1964 he was charging the Victoria and Albert Museum just £5 for a print - virtually cost price. At the Focus Gallery in London, where a collection of his work goes on display and on sale from Tuesday, prices are closer to £12,000.

Not that this would have impressed Brandt himself. "He was always very quiet and unassuming almost reclusive", recalls his nephew Dennis. "He hated any sort of publicity. He said that he never really looked at his own pictures and that anybody could do what he did?'