Bill Brandt

Bill Brandt, Francis Bacon, 1963, Copyright Bill Brandt

We were talking the other day about dreams, and how the verisimilitude of photography fosters their expression. Bill Brandt once said something interesting, in this context, about the way in which familiarity is almost a prerequisite to the expression of strangeness:

"Thus it was I found atmosphere to be the spell that charged the commonplace with beauty. And I am still not sure what atmosphere is. I would be hard put to define it. I only know it is a combination of elements, perhaps most simply and yet most inadequately described in technical terms of lighting and viewpoint, which reveals the subject as familiar yet strange. I doubt whether atmosphere, in the meaning it has for me, can be conveyed by a picture of something which is quite unfamiliar to the beholder."

Brandt's linking of the commonplace and the beautiful, the real and the surreal, was echoed by Susan Sontag when she wrote that "the mainstream of photographic activity has shown that a Surrealist manipulation or theatricalization of the real is unnecessary, if not actually redundant. . . . The less doctored, the less patently crafted, the more naive - the more authoritative the photograph was likely to be."


But I would guess this wisdom was hard won for Brandt, the former pupil of Man Ray. You can see it in the pictures. Although he never abandoned his pursuit of the surreal, he wasn't nearly as successful when he strained for it . . .

Bill Brandt, Campden Hill, London, 1953 . Copyright Bill Brandt

. . . as when he didn't.


Bill Brandt, Evening in Kew Gardens, London, 1930. Copyright Bill Brandt