Beauty displayed as a male possession
In
a documentary made at the end of his life, Brandt summed up Kane's impact:
"When Citizen Kane was first shown, I'd never seen a film in which real
rooms were used and you could see everything, the ceiling, and terrific
perspective, it was all there. It was quite revolutionary, Citizen Kane, and
I was very much inspired by it and I thought: 'I must take photographs like
that.' "And so he left behind the conventions of 1930s social documentary.
To exploit fully the possibilities of deep focus, Brandt took a step
backwards in camera technology and began working with a Kodak wide angle:
"It had a fixed focus, no shutter, and could take a complete panorama of a
room with a single exposure. I learned that the camera had been used at the
beginning of the century by auctioneers, for photographic inventories, and
by Scotland Yard for police records. It was fascinating to watch the effect
of the lens which created a great illusion of space, and an unrealistically
steep perspective, and soon I discovered that it could produce fantastic
anatomical images which I had never seen before. " In many of Brandt's 1940s
nudes, the model locks eyes with the observer, but her gaze is hard to read.
Her mood may be sullen or even threatening; what she never conveys is
seductiveness.
Perhaps tired or dissatisfied, she always wants to keep herself emotionally at a distance. Two of the traditional qualities of the female nude are lacking: sexual availability, and beauty displayed as a male possession. Brandt's aims for his indoor nudes of the 1950s can be seen most clearly in his Belgravia photographs - those taken in the Eaton Place flat that Eva moved to after she and Brandt separated. His first Eaton Place nude (1951) shows a woman's crossed legs - they may be Marjorie's - seen from the head. It belongs with two other pictures that feature the French doors of the flat, opening on to a balcony, and a Victorian spoon-backed chair. One is the Eaton Place Still Life that had been Brandt's farewell present to Eva in 1948, the other is the Portrait Of A Young Girl of 1955, for which Rolf's 10-year-old daughter Judith was the model. In all three pictures, the chair seems to be a surrogate for Eva herself, absent from her flat while Brandt does his work. The deep-focus portrait of Judith makes her into an uncanny, Alice-like figure - perhaps the ghost of the child that Eva and Bill could never have.
For Brandt, the 1960s did not come as any kind of personal liberation; rather, they marked the collapse of the project he had worked on since he had come to England 30 years before. The publication of Shadow Of Light in 1966, a selection of his best pictures in all genres, set the seal on his reputation as the dean of English photographers - an artist rather than a reporter in the view of Cyril Connolly, who wrote the book's introduction. But 1966 was also the year of Antonioni's Blow-Up, a tribute to the new photographic scene of "swinging London". Brandt was in partial eclipse from the late 1960s until his death, taking mostly portraits and excluded from the fashionable photojournalism of the Sunday supplements. He was an unusual émigré in that he was free from the traditional afflictions of nostalgia and loss of roots. For him, there was no feeling of self-division. He never returned to Germany after 1933, and refused to speak his native language. He brought his neurosis with him to England in 1934 and it continued to possess him, in spite of his physical removal from the place that had spawned it. Some things can be preserved by being taken out of their time altogether, such as Brandt's landscapes and formal nudes. But for most of his pictures, the time of their taking is of the essence; and they can deliver that time to us today. Brandt's pictures of the 1930s arose from his special perspective: London as seen from Paris and Vienna. But as time did its sifting, they became everybody's 1930s. Over and over again, the history of art shows how the extraordinary vision of a culture ends up being the typical one. -END