A man of many names and faces
Clemency Burton-Hill
BILL BRANDT: A LIFE by Paul Delany Cape, £35, pp. 335, ISBN 0224052802 1 f you'll excuse the pun, Paul Delany's biography of the man commonly dubbed 'the greatest British photographer' brings one thing sharply into focus. For Bill Brandt was not, as it happens, British at all, but was born in 1904 to German parents of Russian extraction — a fact he denied vehemently all his adult life. This rather fundamental inconvenience raises all manner of questions about psychological identity and the ethics and artifice of self-image-making. It also forces us to re-open the century-old can of worms as to whether an artist's work can be more
profitably understood by having some knowledge of their private life.
The definitive word on this issue came in 1919 from Brandt's contemporary T. S. Eliot, who announced that 'the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality-. Delany — who by the way is an English Literature, not Art History, professor — has taken the opposite approach: his assumption is that unearthing more about Brandt's personality will assist our understanding of his art. Brandt, who photographed Eliot in 1945, would no doubt have been horrified; he went to famously extreme lengths to hide the details of his life from the outside world. Quite apart from the subterfuge of his birth, he changed his name three times, and even from an early age, as Delany explains with self-evident irony, people instinctively felt of this supreme visual penetrator that 'you couldn't look into him'. Despite this — or indeed because of this — the more we do manage to 'look into' Brandt, the more fascinating his photographs become.
Tom Hopkinson, Brandt's editor at Picture Post, offered the perfect converse to Eliot's dictum when he claimed Brandt 'projected [himself] onto whatever he photographed' and indeed, once Delany starts to expose Brandt's life, it is hard not to see it reflected in his lens. He had a materially privileged childhood but revolted against it (to a point); his decision to study Britain's working class for his first book, The English at Home (1936), seems to have had its basis in aesthetic rather than overtly political ideals. His formative experiences of a draconian father and tyrannical boarding school — and the commensurate familial resentment — almost certainly had their artistic consequences, as did the years he spent recovering from TB at a sanatorium in Davos. Similarly influential were his apprenticeship to the Surrealist photographer Man Ray, his friendships with such other greats as BrassaI and Kertesz, and his complicatedly triangular relationship with his devastatingly beautiful wife Eva Boros and Marjorie Beckett. (Eva turns up in many of Brandt's most famous works, most notably as a 'prostitute' in his 1938 homage to Brassai, 'A Night in London'). Reprinting more than 100 photographs, Delany treats us not only to the masterpieces but also to many previously unpublished duotones, and the more we see, the more the epithet 'greatest' seems justified (depressing as this is for British photography given Brandt's real nationality). But although it will look divine there. Delany's luscious book is much more than a coffeetable tome. As the title proclaims, this is supposed to be 'A Life', not a monograph. Like its subject, however, the book has a few identity issues; it doesn't really know what it's trying to be. Too heavy to carry around as you would a standard biography, to treat it as merely a pictorial feast to be dipped into now and again would denigrate its status as a viable literary work. Delany's past subjects include D. H. Lawrence and Rupert Brooke, and his academic background asserts itself almost immediately in some highly literary frames of reference. This can be effective, particularly when he looks at contemporary psychoanalysis and considers its bearing on both Brandt's traumatic relationship with his father and his later sexual preferences (he was a fetishist, a sado-masochist, and lived for most of his life with two women). Sometimes the tendency is pushed too far, however, and Delany's bizarre insistence on surmising details about Brandt's life from apparently 'parallel' figures in literature — such as those found in Robert Musil or Thomas Mann — is untenable. 'To understand ... the Brandts', he writes. 'one turns to Thomas Mann,' Poor Eliot would be turning in his grave — and at this point then, perhaps we should leave Delany's more tangential speculations alone and let the magnificent photographs speak for themselves. In all likelihood, they're the closest we'll ever get to a man who was born Hermann Wilhelm and, by his own choice, died 'Bill'.
Bill Brandt: A Century Retrospective, curated by John-Paul Kernot and organised by the Bill Brandt Archive, is at the Victoria & Albert Museum until 25 July.
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