Too much?
Sir: Bill Brandt takes fine photographs, there's no doubt about that—they are certainly the ones that stick in the memory from the days of Picture Post and Lilliput. But John McEwen (Art, II December) claims too much when he maintains that Brandt's photographs of the 'thirties industrial scene give us a precise and truthful account of that period. Few of them were 'caught moments' in the Cartier-Bresson meaning of the term; like Brassai's night pictures of Paris they were carefully arranged situations—sometimes leaning heavily towards lyricism (the Jarrow man with the sack of coal on his bike), and sometimes even altering facts in order to gain a stronger dramatic effect. The 'Northumbrian miner at his evening meal' is a case in point; pitmen did not sit down to eat with their faces and hands black with coal dust, and I understand that when Brandt was challenged about this he did admit that he had arranged the subject in this way because the social effect would then be more telling. And his stark, 'contrasty' technique, too, gives a hard emphasis to this apparent realism—a technique used in the Salvation Army's 'For God's Sake' campaign and more recently by Donald McCullin in his 'Save our Cities' series in the Sunday Times magazine. It mustn't be forgotten that photographic reportage is just as subjective as any other.
William Hewison Art Editor, Punch, 23-27 Tudor Street, London EC4
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