Nigel Warburton

In 1941 Bill Brandt was commissioned by the newly formed National Buildings Record (NBR) to photograph monuments in various English cathedrals and churches as a record against possible bomb damage, a task that he carried out alongside his photojournalistic work until 1943. Although occasionally mentioned in passing, the NBR photographs have rarely been reproduced.[1] The principal aim in presenting a selection of them here (see following portfolio) is to bring to light an important dimension of Brandt wartime work, one that is seldom given due attention in surveys of his career. This is not to suggest that the images presented here are as Brandt would have printed them - it would be invidious to present prints that have been made without the photographer's supervision as definitive of his intentions - it would be particularly so in Brandt's case as much of his creative input occurred in the darkroom. He made this explicit in his 1948 statement in Camera in London:

I consider it essential that the photographer should do his own printing and enlarging. The final effect of the finished print depends so much on these operations. And only the photographer himself knows the effect he wants.[2]

He reiterated this view in an article written in 1959:

I can never understand how some photographers send their films out to a processing firm. Much of the powerful effect of William Klein's 'New York' was due, I am sure, to his very personal printing which stressed just what he wanted to bring out in the pictures.[3]

Despite this, the images reproduced here have the value that a painter's sketchbooks can have. We can see Brandt trying out different ideas; see how, working within quite narrow constraints, he could still produce subtle and arresting images. In several cases there are striking parallels with his better known work. In this context it is worth noting that Brandt's best work of this period was done on assignment:

I hardly ever take photographs except on an assignment. It is nor that I do not get pleasure from the actual taking of photographs, but rather that the necessity of fulfilling a contract the sheer having to do a job - supplies an incentive, without which the taking of photographs just for fun seems to leave the fun rather flat.[4]

The public perception of Brandt

The public perception of Brandt as an artist selecting his own subject matter and determining for himself how his photographs would be presented is not entirely accurate about his work methods in the period that concerns us here. It largely reflects Brandt's practice in later years. The magazines that he worked for in the Thirties and Forties included Weekly Illustrated. Picture Post. Lilliput, and Harper's Bazaar and in many cases he would have had to work to quite a limiting brief and for a popular audience. Nevertheless most of his better known pictures of this period, such as the wartime series of London by moonlight, originated from such assignments. The more astute picture editors realized Brandt's particular strengths as a photographer, and played to them. Tom Hopkinson, for instance, who at various times commissioned Brandt both for Picture Post and Lilliput, and recognized Brandt's ability to impose a vision of the world through his photographic style, commented in a radio interview that the only work assignments he gave him were 'very specialised series that only he could do' citing the Moonlit London series as an example.[5] This did not prevent Brandt working on some assignments that seem in retrospect positively un-Brandtian.[6]

Baedeker Raids

The threat to historic buildings in wartime was great: the German press coined the phrase 'Baedeker Raid' (after Karl Baedeker's famous guidebooks) to describe retaliatory attacks deliberately targeted on English towns of historic and cultural significance. These were Hitler's response to Bomber' Harris's raids on German cities, some of which had no obvious military significance. Baedeker raids had great potential to undermine national morale: the sense of continuity with the past symbolized by historic buildings, and particularly by cathedrals, was cherished by the generation Brandt had photographed for The English at Home (1936). In this context it is interesting to note that Powell and Pressburger chose Canterbury cathedral as a backdrop for their film A Canterbury Tale (1944), a film that emphasized an almost mystical link with the past and the threat to continuity in the wartime present. Canterbury, which had been the recipient of the first wartime bomb on mainland Britain in May 1939, was the victim of a Baedeker raid in May 1942 as a direct response to an RAF raid on Cologne that had killed almost 500 people.[7]

Brandt photographed the aftermath of a similarly calculated attack on Bath for a photo-essay that appeared in Picture Post in July of the same year: 'Bath: What the Nazis mean by a "Baedeker Raid" '.[8] The Picture Post images are of the bombed remains of once elegant Regency houses; the captions demonstrate the importance and urgency of the NBR's wartime work, as well as the way that attacks on heritage were turned to propaganda:

"The house that deserved a long life. Bath's climate is kind to old age. But in one night Nazi bombs destroy work that has lasted for centuries.[9] The gash in the heart of Bath. Most of the city can be restored, but houses in Somerset Place have gone for ever. One night of violence was enough."

Exeter, Norwich, and York all received similar 'spite - attacks' from the Luftwaffe and many important buildings and monuments were destroyed or damaged-York, for instance, lost its medieval guildhall and the nearby parish church of St Martin.'' However, even before such calculated attacks on English heritage there was clearly an urgent need to provide and coordinate photographic documentation of buildings of special architectural or historical interest, both as a guide to their eventual reconstruction and restoration, and, in the worst cases, as in Bath's Somerset Place, as a visual record of what had been destroyed. Brandt, who had himself been caught in a terrifying incendiary raid when his train stopped short of London Bridge in December 1940, could have had no illusions about the threat to such buildings.

The National Buildings Record and The War

The National Buildings Record was formed in 1941. Counting among its founders Sir John Summerson and Sir Kenneth Clark, its principal aim was to record for posterity documentary evidence of architecture of special interest. Brandt was recruited to work for the NBR at Sir John Summerson's personal request, [12] his task being to document a wide range of church and cathedral monuments and interiors - a suitable commission in view of the fact that Brandt had originally wanted to train as an architect, a career denied him by illhealth. The pictures reproduced here are all from Rochester and Canterbury cathedrals, but the NBR archive in Savile Row - now part of the Royal Commission on Historical Monuments of England -has several hundred of his contact prints including records of Chichester cathedral, a number of churches in Essex, and Spencer House, London. Of these, the Canterbury pictures are by far the most interesting from the point of view of Brandt's subsequent development. Before turning to these photographs it is worth giving a brief sketch of Brandt's photographic career up to and including World War II.

By the outbreak of war Brandt had already published two books. The first, The English at Home (1936), was, at least on the surface, an attempt to characterize the English, rich and poor. Raymond Mortimer, who wrote the introduction, described Brandt as an anthropologist as well as an artist:

He seems to have wandered about England with the detached curiosity of a man investigating the customs of some remote and unfamiliar tribe. [13]

Brandt, who was born in Hamburg of an English father of Russian descent and of a German mother, and who had spent five of his formative years in a sanatorium in Switzerland (two of them in bed) recovering from tuberculosis, turned his émigré's 'detached curiosity' into a distinctive photographic style.

In retrospect, examining his early photography in the context of his later work, we can see that even in the Thirties Brandt was achieving more than a simple documentation of British society. The influence of Surrealism was more substantial than it might at first appear Brandt had worked as Man Ray's assistant in Paris for three months in 1929 and, though Man Ray spent little time with him, Brandt had clearly absorbed something of the Surrealist sensibility yet without its characteristic posturing and delight in the shocking. Some of his earliest published work had appeared in the Surrealist journal Minotaure. Brandt's Surrealism was more subtle and gentle than that of Man Ray, Buñuel, or Dali and consequently more easily overlooked.[14] In images such as the silhouetted tic tac man at the races, his arms outstretched in cruciform, or of the youth at Billingsgate with a large fish incongruously balanced on his head, Brandt was true to André Breton's description of Surrealism:

I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are apparently so contradictory, into a sort of absolute reality, a surreality, so to speak.[15]

Photojournalistic contexts

Many of Brandt's photographs of this period, even though they first appeared in photojournalistic contexts, invite interpretation as expressive works of art as much as social documents. Brandt's stark later printing style, reducing detail to areas of black and white with few gradations in between, successfully abstracted and transformed even the most literal of these photographs, moving them to a symbolic level of dreamlike intensity obscuring almost all documentary detail.

His second book, A Night in London (1938), commissioned to emulate

BrassaI's Paris de Nuit (1933), documented a London night in sixty-four images, many of them staged. A contemporary reviewer, G. W. Stonier, in the New Statesman gives an indication of how the book was received:

Though Mr Brandt does not underline his sympathies, his book might well be intended as propaganda for Socialism. The contrasts it illustrates between wealth and poverty are shocking.

Yet, again in retrospect, we can see in this book a far more personal expression of what David Mellor has dubbed Brandt's 'phantasms' [17] than was perhaps apparent at the time of publication: the dark streets and staged scenarios serve the dual purpose of presenting a vision of London while simultaneously suggesting a dream journey.

[18]

Lilliput

Many of Brandt's best known photographs of the Thirties and Forties appeared in the magazine Lilliput from 1937 onwards, often in the form of the eight-page photo essay. His exquisite images of moonlit London in the blackout during the phoney war, 'Blackout in London', were printed here in 1939 (turning the tables on Brassai who was subsequently commissioned by the magazine to photograph a series of Paris in the blackout

[20]

[21]

[22]

Dramatic, dismal lit masses of reclining figures fading to perspective point. No lines just a hole, no platform, and the tremendous perspective.

[23]

Brandt's shelter images

Brandt's shelter images, thirty-nine in all, had been commisioned by the Ministry of Information and were made in the week of 4-12 November 1940.

[24]

Elephant and Castle Station 3:45 am.'eternalizes for me the dreamlike monotony of wartime London'.

[25]

His series was made during some of the worst bombing in London and was used by the Ministry of Information as propaganda: a set of prints was given to Wendell Wilkie who presented them as part of his report to President Roosevelt to show how Londoners were taking it-thus Brandt may have indirectly affected US policy on aid for Britain. They have continued to be reproduced as symbols of the British Wartime Spirit.

[26]

The historian Angus Calder has recently alleged that received opinion about the spirit of comaraderie and stoical indifference towards the London Blitz is something of a myth (for instance, Churchill and the royal family were booed when touring the aftermath of air raids): in this context he points out that only those Brandt shelter pictures that contribute to the myth have become famous, whereas others, such as one of a smiling couple under a quilt 'who might come from some wacky Hollywood movie', are rarely seen.

[27]

Sinister attempt to falsify the past?

However, there is no need to see this subsequent use of Brandt's photographs as any sinister attempt to falsify the past: the frequently reproduced shelter pictures are far more interesting formally and for their content than the less familiar ones. The best of them are surreal evocations of sleep and vulnerability - many hinting at death - which still document accurately the grim conditions underground.

As one might expect from a large scale commission to document church monuments, many of Brandt's NBR photographs are functional and relatively uninteresting to photographic (as opposed to architectural) historian: many are straightforward records of memorials, sculptures, mouldings, columns, and church interiors. Yet a surprising number transcend their function, many achieving the kind of surreality described above. Among the photographs from Rochester Cathedral taken in 1942, a number include details of human presence. In one (figure 1) a ladder is leaning against the wall something Brandt could easily have moved but which he has chosen to include. In another (portfolio 2) a slightly sinister stove lurks in an alcove. Others concentrate on the symmetry and formal beauty of patterns of arches (figures 2-3). Most striking among these is the image of pools of light at the feet of columns (portfolio 1).

Canterbury Cathedral photographs

A large proportion of the Canterbury Cathedral photographs depict statues and effigies. These were a favourite subject matter for Brandt. One of his first published images, no doubt influenced by Atget's pictures of dummies in shop windows,[28] was of a dummy with a disproportionately small doll's head and a wide-eyed stare in a Parisian flea market.[29]

Of the 144 images in Shadow of Light, ten feature statues, dummies, or effigies of some kind. Mostly these photographs play with the near lifelike postures of the statues: the half-alive quality of dummies, dolls, and statues made them a favourite subject for the surrealists. In this vein Brandt photographed the serene dignity of a stone angel standing knee-deep in shrubs in Highgate Cemetery [30] and the incongruous and faintly disturbing moustachioed figurehead in a rock garden in the Scilly Isles. A Picture Post story, 'Daybreak at the Crystal Palace',[31] consists of eight photographs of statues in the grounds of Crystal Palace, ranging from 'The Mourning Maiden' to the famous dinosaur statues captioned 'While Playing Around the Pool You Find These'. Many of his pictures of people, and in particular the nudes, have a statue-like quality: [32] this is in part due to the hard contrasts of the later printing style that tended to eliminate details of texture, rendering skin as grained stone.

Irony & fascination with statues and effigies

In his photographs in Canterbury Cathedral Brandt showed a similar fascination with statues and effigies and their disconcerting verisimilitude. The female effigy in the crypt of the cathedral (portfolio 5) despite its damaged face and missing hands conveys an impression of blissful sleep. The diagonal composition and the posture, together with the way the face is framed by the head-dress, are strikingly reminiscent of the earlier picture (taken the previous year) of a woman asleep in a sarcophagus in Christ Church, Spitalfields, sheltering from the Blitz [33] - an irony that would be unlikely to have been lost on Brandt. The Canterbury picture, with its disconcerting combination of serenity and effacement and stark Brandtian contrasts of light and darkness, could justifiably take its place in the main body of Brandt's work and would have lent itself well to the extreme tones of his later printing style.

The image of the faceless doll-like female effigy (portfolio 6) with its disproportionately small face bears resemblances both to the photograph of the Flea Market dummy mentioned above,

[34]

[35]

The image of the Dean Fotherby Monument from the Lady Chapel, Canterbury (portfolio 7) manages both to depict a memento monument - a realistic sculpture of heaped bones and skulls and at the same time heighten its message with the right-hand side of the picture dissolving into dark shadows with only an inverted skull's stare peering from the gloom.

In this introduction to Camera in London (1948), Brandt declared:

It is part of the photographer's job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time or of the traveller who enters a strange country.[36]

Whether or not all photographers should be bound by this dictum, it aptly describes Brandt's approach to the NBR commission and the sensibility that gave coherence to his photography across the different genres. The intensity of the seeing leads to a quality of mystery that is the very essence of Brandt's style.

Notes

1. A notable exception was the exhibition 'Bill Brandt: War Work', The Photographers Gallery, London, 24 June-3 September 1983. This exhibition included two photographs of Canterbury Cathedral from the National Buildings Record.

2. Bill Brandt, Camera in London, London: The Focal Press 1948, 14.

3. Bill Brandt, 'Bill Brandt Today ... and Yesterday', Photography (June 1959), 21.

4. Brandt, Camera in London, 17.

5. Tom Hopkinson interviewed by Paul Vaughan on BBC Radio Kaleidoscope. 23 May 1975.

6. Perhaps the most notable example is 'Simple Story (Lilliput 9:3 (September 1941), 23542), which is a highly sentimental pictorial romance of a young woman called Mary who falls for a dashing young sergeant called Jack whom she meets in the park. The final image is of two empty park chairs in the moonlight.

7. See 50 Years of the National Buildings Record 1941-1991, London: Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England 1991. 18.

8. Bath: What the Nazis mean by a "Baedeker Raid"', Picture Post (4 July 1942), 20-1.

9. Ibid., 20. 10. Ibid.. 21.

11. See 50 years of the National Buildings Record, 17.

12. See David Mellor, Bill Brandt: A Retrospective Exhibition, Bath: The Royal Photographic Society 1981, 12.

13. Bill Brandt, The English at Home, London: Batsford 1936, p.4.

14. For a fuller treatment of this idea, see David Mellor's essay 'Brandt's phantasms' in Mark Haworth-Booth, and David Mellor, Bill Brandt, Behind the Camera, Oxford: Phaidon 1985, 71-97.

15. Quoted by Dennis Longwell, introduction to Surrealist Photographic Portraits (exhibition catalogue), New York: Marlborough Fine Art 1981, 1.

16. G. W. Stonier, 'London Night', New Statesman (16 July 1938).

17. See David Mellor, Brandt's phantasms'.

18. Compare this with 'Nightwalk ... a dream phantasy in photographs by Bill Brandt', Coronet (U.S.) (January 1941), 47-54, which is a direct attempt to photograph dream imagery through the use of double exposure, etc.

19. Bill Brandt, 'Blackout in London', Lilliput 5:6 (December 1939), 551-8.

20. BrassaI, 'Blackout in Paris', Lilliput 6:6 (June 1940), 509-16.

21. Bill Brandt, 'London by moonlight', Lilliput 11:2 (August 1942), 13044. (N.B. This issue of Lilliput also contains a profile of the photographer by Tom Hopi.nson.)

22. Lilliput 11:6 (December 1942), 473-82.

23. Quoted by Rupert Martin in the exhibition catalogue Bill Brandt: War Work, London: The Photographers Gallery 1983, 1.

24. See Joanne Buggins, 'An appreciation of the shelter pictures taken by Bill Brandt in November, 1940', Imperial War Museum Review 4(1989) and Michael Seabome. Shelters, Nishen Photo-Library 7 (1988).

25. Quoted in Haworth-Booth and Mellor, Bill Brandt Behind the Camera.

26. For example, the photograph of Elephant and Castle tube station was used in the wartime propaganda Front Line 1940-41 The Official Story of the Civil Defence of Britain, London: HMSO 1942. 63. (1 am grateful to Mike Wells for drawing my attention to this book.)

27. Angus Calder, The Myth of the Blitz. London: Pimlico 1992. especially plates 10-13 and their captions.

28. Atget also made photographs of statues in churches. For the view that Brandt was not significantly influenced by Atget see Norman Hail. 'Bill Brandt: True Londoner' in Bill Brandt (exhibition catalogue) London: Marlborough Fine Art 1976.

29. Bill Brandt, Shadow of Light, 2nd edition. London: Gordon Fraser 1977. plate 60.

30. Ibid., plate 8. This image is juxtaposed with the stony glare of the pariourmaid Pratt on her Wednesday afternoon off in a visual joke reminiscent of Stefan Lorant's visual puns in Lilliput. Mysteriously the photograph of the parlourmaid is described in Shadow of Light as 'A resident of Putney: the image first appeared in The Perfect Parlourmaid', Picture Post (29 July 1939), 4-6, with the caption Taking Her Afternoon Off- Every Wednesday Pratt has her "half day". She leaves at noon and makes straight for London, whence she visits friends at Putney. She does a little shopping, sees a film, and is back again by 10.30.'

31. 'Daybreak at the Crystal Palace'. Picture Post (11 February 1939).

32. It is interesting to compare some of Brandi's nudes with his photographs of Mailiol's stone and bronze sculptures ot'nudes -see 'Nudes are Back', Life (International) (20 November 1961), 82-6.

33. Brandt. Shadow of Light, plate 56.

34. Ibid., plate 60.

35. Ibid., plate 51.

36. Brandt. Camera in London, 14.