Biography: It has not passed unnoticed by a number of English critics that two of their country's most famous photographers were born a century ago, in 1904. The natural inclination among those same critics has been to dwell on differences between the pair, rather than on any similarities, even though the latter are just as striking, writes Robert O'Byrne.
Of course, some of the disparities are hard to miss. For while dandified Cecil Beaton's place of birth was England, reclusive Bill Brandt's was not. Brandt - described, one suspects with typical asperity, by Beaton as "the Samuel Beckett of photographers" - came from Hamburg, where for generations his family had been prosperous merchants and bankers, very similar to those described in Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks. But his father's birth in London meant that Willy Brandt, as the photographer was called during childhood, was entitled to British citizenship, a fact of which he took advantage when settling in England in April 1934.
Thereafter, he never visited Germany again and refused to speak German, spurning the country of his birth entirely. His biographer believes that Brandt's dislike of all things German arose from time spent at an extremely strict Prussian secondary school, although no specific evidence is offered to support this allegation.
It hardly matters; from the moment of his arrival there, England became and remained Brandt's home. That last is an apposite word, since it occurs in the title of the photographer's first book, The English at Home, which appeared in 1936. The idea for this work was so obvious, the only wonder must be that no one else had thought of it before: to depict the enormous contrasts between the highest and lowest levels of English society, between race-goers at Ascot and the residents of London's east end slums.
As a source for the former, Brandt used members of his father's family who were resident in England. Pictures from the book, such as that showing a party held for affluent children in Kensington or cocktails on the lawn in Surrey, showed the photographer's cousins and uncles who had agreed to pose for him. Likewise in a later volume, A Night in London (1938), there is a well-known image called Street Scene, which, despite a degree of ambiguity, appears to show a man accosting a prostitute. The two figures in this photograph were Brandt's brother Rolf and the latter's wife.
Given the limitations of the equipment then available, it was inevitable that any picture taken would have to be posed and the people being photographed would be requested to hold their positions for some time. Still, it comes as a shock to discover just how great a degree of contrivance and artifice was involved in Brandt's art; as much, in fact, as that deployed by Beaton, albeit to different ends. But those ends were not necessarily political. Bill Brandt might have been the Samuel Beckett of photographers; he most definitely was not that profession's George Orwell.
Although during the early part of his career in England he displayed a fascination with the extremes of social difference, this indicated no desire to encourage change to the status quo. As he later explained, his motivation arose from a sense of the potential for visual excitement stimulated by observation of the English social spectrum's two furthest ends, and an understanding of what powerful pictures these could provide. "I never intended them," Brandt said of the work he produced during the 1930s, "for political propaganda."
In the final years of his life, he derived pleasure from his step-grandson's attendance at Eton, from reading the Daily Telegraph and from the government of Mrs Thatcher. Even if only with a lower-case "c", Brandt was a life-long conservative.
It becomes clear that his real interest lay not in changing the world but in interpreting it through a specific vision. What that vision might have been is most evident in the series of female nudes taken by Brandt during the 1940s and 1950s and for which he most wished to be remembered. There is nothing erotic or romantic about these studies; instead, they revel in the architectural possibilities of the human form, breaking it down into a sequence of shapes that combine into a harmonious whole. They show the body effectively disembodied and transformed into a dramatic structure. Evidently Brandt's primary interest lay in photography as a kind of drama; of the London he had seen during the second World War, he wrote that "Under the soft light of the moon the blacked-out town had a new beauty. The houses looked flat like painted scenery and the bombed ruins made strangely shaped silhouettes." Similarly, the portraiture that made up a great deal of his later work is given an unnaturally-heightened dramatic quality thanks to Brandt's tendency to exaggerate the extremes of black and white in photography and to locate his subjects in bleak or isolated scenarios.
Never an innovator, from what did he derive his inspiration? His biographer cites a number of sources, some of them acknowledged by Brandt himself. They are predominantly cinematic and include Robert Wiene's 1919 silent film, The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, and, somewhat later but just as influential, Orson Welles's, Citizen Kane, of which Brandt admitted: "I was very much inspired by it and I thought: 'I must take photographs like that.'"
He did, which is why, like Welles's film, his photography remains so distinctive, simultaneously so easily emulated and yet never successfully imitated.
This new biography is exemplary in its examination of the subject's life and its analysis of his work. Admirably produced, the book nevertheless suffers from one drawback: Brandt left behind more than 5,000 pictures but only a tiny fraction of that number are included here. The best way to justify Paul Delany's proposition that Bill Brandt "is surely the greatest of British photographers" would be through the inclusion of an abundance of photographs, each of them a more eloquent testament than the author's words. These are unquestionably fine, but Brandt's pictures would be finer still.
Incidentally, despite Cecil Beaton's remark about their analogy, Brandt never managed to take Samuel Beckett's portrait. When asked to do so in 1979, he and the writer disagreed so strongly that the commission was stillborn.
Robert O'Byrne is a writer and critic. His book, Living in Dublin, was published last autumn
Bill Brandt: A Life. By Paul Delany Jonathan Cape, 336pp. £35