YCBA Celebrates A Photographic Visionary With Bill Brandt Exhibition

By Shannon Hicks

NEW HAVEN — “Bill Brandt is to British photography of the 20th Century what Andy Warhol was to Pop art.”

That was how docent Judy Kollias described the photographer during a recent tour of “Bill Brandt: A Retrospective.” The major exhibition remains at Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) for just a few more weeks, closing on July 20. It is a celebration of Mr Brandt’s work and a feasible timeline of his photographic life. While it does not include any of Mr Brandt’s well-known fashion photos and color photos, the show is nevertheless entertaining and quite enjoyable for anyone who enjoys photography of many genres.

A selection of 155 gelatin silver prints, all in black frames and surrounded by large mattes, follows a loose path of Mr Brandt’s career, beginning with his photojournalism and documentary work and then continuing through his explorations of portraiture, his return to landscapes, and subsequent nudes work. Surrealism is the thread that links many of the images regardless of the stage of the photographer’s career.

Born in Germany in 1904 (nee Hermann Wilhelm Brandt), Bill Brandt’s work is known around the world for its exceptional range and the photographer’s distinctive vision. He was inspirational in a field that was still in its youngest stages when he took up photography in 1927 after moving to Vienna.

Mr Brandt made a portrait in 1928 of the American poet Ezra Pound and it was that one image that really began the photographer’s career. That portrait –– which is included in the show alongside portraits of Barbara Hepworth, Graham Greene, Peter Sellers, and Dylan Thomas, among a dozen others –– was so loved by Mr Pound that the poet took Mr Brandt and introduced him to the American Surrealist Man Ray, who was then working in Paris. The subsequent three-month period Mr Brandt spent working with Man Ray resulted in the hint of Surrealism that shows up in Mr Brandt’s work for the remainder of his life.

The photographer was hardly a purist. Mr Brandt’s earlier images may appear to be shot off the cuff, but they were not. A man leans against a light pole in a foggy street in “After The Celebration,” a woman scrubs her husband’s back in “Coal Miner’s Bath, Chester-le-Street, Durham,” and an elderly woman sleeps in an Underground station during World War II in “Old Lady in Pimplico Air Raid Shelter with Silver Cane” –– these images were all carefully designed and arranged by the photographer.

The air raid shelter scenes, for instance, which depict late night scenes, were actually shot during the daylight hours. Docent Judy Kollias explained recently that due to security reasons, London police did not want a photographer and large groups of people in the shelters late at night. The scenes were shot during the day and Mr Brandt used darkroom techniques to make many of his images much darker than they really were when photographed.

He also manipulated some of his images, but very subtlety, by retouching them with pen and pencil.

“He did his photography and then he printed them soon after from his negatives,” Ms Kollias said. “Many are retouched or he somehow added to them.

“He wasn’t a purist about his prints,” she continued, using “Behind The Restaurant” as an example. In that print, a formally dressed waiter seems to have gone out the back of the restaurant where he is presumably working and has startled a man who had been rifling through the garbage. That scene was actually carefully planned, Ms Kollias explained, right down to the poses of the two men.

“Brandt often did drawings of what he wanted his image to look like before he took a photo,” Ms Kollias said. “He manipulated people and props. It’s not all as spontaneous as it looks.

“You know how they say the camera never lies? Forget that. With him, it did. It was misleading, at least.”

By the time he returned to his landscapes and even moved into his nudes, Mr Brandt had learned to let the camera pick up things that his eye may not have noticed. He loosened his grip on trying to arrange everything in a frame, and allowed himself to perhaps enjoy photography more than ever before in his life. The final images in the exhibition –– if visitors decide to follow the show chronologically –– are the tasteful nudes dating from the early 1940s to the mid 1970s.

Mr Brandt’s later nudes rarely force the body’s sometimes forbidden parts into the viewer’s face. While there are a number of female breasts in a number of the images –– works from the 1940s show women posed in moodily lit interiors –– it seemed to be Mr Brandt’s intention by the 1950s to instead celebrate the beauty of the body as a whole and also with its parts. The nudes also offer a fuller tip of the hat to the photographer’s love of Surrealism.

“Nude, East Sussex,” done in 1957, shows a closeup of the right side of a human face with a beach stretching behind the person and a rocky bluff in the distance. The person’s face is not seen; his or her ear is the most defined feature in the photo.

His innovative nude studies, according to information provided by YCBA, “defined new territory in showing photography’s kinship with sculpture and modernist abstraction.”

“Bill Brandt: A Retrospective” has been culled from the Bill Brandt Archive in London. It was curated by John-Paul Kernot, organized by the Brandt Archive, and circulated by Curatorial Assistance, Los Angeles, Calif. The exhibition began a world tour with a showing at New York City’s International Center of Photography in August 1999 and has also been shown in San Diego, two locations in Australia, and then in at Milwaukee Art Museum. New Haven’s presentation is the final US venue before the exhibition heads to London, where it will be presented at The Victoria and Albert Museum next spring.

YCBA is at 1080 Chapel Street, on the corner of High Street in New Haven. It is open Tuesday through Saturday from 10 am to 5 pm and Sunday from noon to 5 pm. Admission is free. Docent-led tours of exhibitions are offered Thursdays at 11 am and Saturdays at noon; “Bill Brandt: A Retrospective” tours are scheduled for Saturday, July 5, Thursday, July 17, and Saturday, July 19. Call 203-432-2800 or visit www.yale.edu/YCBA for additional information.

Yale Center for British Art is also currently presenting “Behold, the Sea Itself,” which will remain on view until September 7.