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Hard times remembered

Stunning pictures by one of Britain's top photographers chronicling the North East's rich coal mining heritage have gone on display.

Simon Armstrong | 31 March 2004 | Evening Chronicle Newcastle

Spectacular images taken in 1937 by renowned photographer Bill Brandt are on show at London's Victoria and Albert Museum.Brandt was one of the most acclaimed cameramen of the 20th Century, celebrated for his social commentary and vivid depictions of everyday life. Among his works were seven pictures from this region featuring proud miners from Durham, Chester-le-Street and Northumberland at work and at home as well as another striking shot showing a train leaving Newcastle station.Now they are all on public view at the V and A along with nearly 150 of his other vintage pieces to mark the centenary of his birth in 1904.

Mark Haworth-Booth, the museum's senior curator of photographs, is delighted with the displays.

"This is a very special exhibition of Bill Brandt's work: the essential works of an essential photographer, using rare prints from his own archive," he said. "It is the finest selection of his prints to be seen in Britain for more than 30 years."

Artist David Hockney is another fan of Brandt's and recommends going to see them first hand.

"His pictures survive and enter the memory because they were constructed by an artist" .

Born in Hamburg, he arrived in England in 1931 as a freelance after beginning his career in Vienna three years earlier. He soon began photographing the industrial north heartlands and affluent south as well as focusing on some the greatest creative figures of the time, building a reputation second to none before his death in 1983.

Among other images on display are pictures documenting London's East End, its moonlit streets during the blackouts at the start of the Second World War.Brandt also photographed crowds sheltering in Underground stations during the blitz. Experimenting with his camera, he travelled on wartime trains across the country to the most scenic settings in Britain.

Earlier this month, the first biography of his life was published. Entitled Bill Brandt, A Life, the book (left) includes two of his North East photographs: Train Leaving Newcastle and Coal Searcher Going Home to Jarrow.