PHOTOGRAPHY: STUDY AND ANALYSIS
Establishing the superiority of the private reality
Brandt
had started with portraits in the Vienna studio style: close-up head shots
with stark lighting and plain background (designed to make the subject look
like "someone special"). Once in England, more free from commercial
restrictions, Brandt was drawn to subjects who were given dignity by their
place in the world, rather than by individual force of character. He took
portraits regularly for the next 40 years. Part of the reason for doing them
was economic, but Brandt would accept commissions only to take people who were
in some way creative: writers, musicians, painters, actors and film directors.
The series of poets for Lilliput reveals a characteristic Brandtian quality of remoteness in his sitters. They seem to be surrounded by a glass bell, impervious to any gaze from outside. His portraits of continental artists, effective as they may be as likenesses, lack the cumulative effect of the parade of English culture-heroes who passed before his lens. These appear as members of a distinct national family, yet each also set apart in lonely self-containment. Cyril Connolly described Brandt's portrait of Francis Bacon as "a symbol of the despair of his generation". It is certainly a quintessential Brandt portrait, with Bacon's haunted look matched by what he does not see behind him: the ominous trees on the skyline, the path in an impossible perspective, the leaning lamp-post seemingly transported from a German expressionist film. Does it matter that Bacon himself hated the picture? John Berger has argued that Brandt's portraits of artists and writers "romanticize all the sitters in the name of art, establishing the superiority of the private reality". They also might be criticized for their unrelieved melodrama. Many use low-angle shots in the Citizen Kane style, turning their subjects into looming, ominous figures. Yet for Brandt's artists, writers or actors, solemn expressions are not just a cliché: repeatedly, he captures the depressive element in them, showing the despair that always stalks the perfectionist. As the war neared its end, Brandt took up the work for which he most wanted to be remembered: his studies of the female nude. English photographers had contributed little to the genre: it was not even clear what an English nude would look like. The originality of Brandt's nudes begins with his passion for technical innovation. Nudity itself often seems less important to him than the formal possibilities of photographing a figure in a room. Brandt's inspiration here did not come from earlier masters of nude photography, but from the many inventions of the most important film in his life, Orson Welles's Citizen Kane.
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