“It is part of a photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. He must have and keep in him something of the receptiveness of the child who looks at the world for the first time, or the traveller who enters a strange country.”
- Bill Brandt (1904-1983)
British master photographer Bill Brandt’s wide ranging work is explored in this comprehensive touring exhibition. From Brandt’s early work that documents fixed social contrasts of pre-World War II life in Britain to his later experimentation with a surreal style, this exhibition spans 50 years of Brandt’s far reaching career through 155 vintage gelatin silver prints from the Bill Brandt Archive in London.
Born in Hamburg in 1904 to an English father and a German mother, Bill Brandt spent a portion of his youth recovering from tuberculosis in a sanatorium in the Alps, before launching his photographic career with a portrait of the poet Ezra Pound.
He was in Paris in the Golden Age of Surrealism, as an assistant to Man Ray, a post held at different times by Bernice Abbott and Lee Miller. Surrealism infused Brandt’s visual imagination and fired his enthusiasm for photography.
Brandt moved to London, settling there in 1934, working as a photojournalist for Weekly Illustrated, the Black Star picture agency, and later for the mass circulation Lilliput and Picture Post magazines. He was sent on a wide range of assignments. Yet whatever his subject matter he imbued it with a sense of strangeness and mystery. Ostensibly documentary images of deserted moonlit London streets in the blackout, or sleepers in the Underground during the Blitz achieved the enigmatic quality of paintings by Giorgio de Chirico. His photographs of miners and of Northern cityscapes took on rich symbolic connotations.
Reviewers of his first book, The English at Home (1936), which juxtaposed rich and poor, took it to be socialist propaganda. But Brandt’s real interest was in visual contrasts. His second book, A Night in London (1938), inspired by Brassai’s Paris by Night, is a photographic journey through the city from dusk to dawn. Brandt’s photographs of the 1930s define an era, but are much more than social documents. They bring an outsider’s eye to the strangeness of English rituals and social categories.
Not all Brandt’s records of pre-war Britain are straightforward documents: he frequently asked friends and relations to pose as models in staged acts of photo-fiction. His sensibility was pictorialist, not realist. For Brandt the effect of a picture was more important than how it was achieved. He would use the full range of darkroom techniques to produce the image he wanted. The camera was a tool for the imagination and no mere recording device.
After The Celebration, 1934-35
Copyright: Bill Brandt Archive LTD.
In the 1940s and 1950s, Brandt became preoccupied with landscape. What he sought to capture and express was not the mere appearance of a place, but its atmosphere: “the spell that charged the commonplace with beauty.”
Many of Brandt’s landscapes have pared detail away until there is little but form and contrast – resolving an image to the essence of a place rather than its specifics. There is continuity here with his work on the nude, which at times has the figure blending with its environment to the extent that flesh and rock are indistinguishable, or are absorbed one into the other. As with his landscapes, the nudes are highly abstract interpretations of atmosphere and form, but their source in the body provides a psychological resonance that operates at a pre-conscious level.
Brandt was a master of poetic photography, a true photographic artist. In a career spanning 60 years he made distinctive contributions to all the major genres, including portraiture, social documentary, landscape and the nude, achieving a recognisable individual style throughout. He created perhaps fifty images that have so burnt themselves onto the visual consciousness that they merit the label ‘icon.’ He brought a sense of mystery and strangeness to everything he photographed, transporting the viewer not back to reality, but to something close to a dream.
Information by Bill Brandt Archive
and Nigel Warburton, 2004
Bill Brandt: A Retrospective, curated by John-Paul Kernot, is organised by the Bill Brandt Archive and is circulated by Curatorial Assistance Traveling Exhibitions (CATE), Pasadena, California
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John Athill Frith (Bermudian, 1835-1907)
Opening of the Swing Bridge in St. George, 1871
Albumen print
Collection of the BNG. Gift Of Scott Stallard
The History of Photography & Bermuda
Ondaatje Wing
Presented chronologically, this exhibition follows the artistic, historical and cultural development of Bermuda through its decorative and fine arts, with a focus on photography from the earliest salt prints to the contemporary capture. The exhibition features work by Bermudian photographers such as Richard Saunders, John Weatherill, Nicholas Lusher, John Athill Frith and James Heyl, as well as visiting artists like Karl Struss. The exhibition also features a display of vintage cameras.
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Wooden plate camera
ca. 1870-1920
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Richard Saunders (Bermudian, 1922-1987)
Members of the 4-C Club listening to instructor,
Upper Volta, 1972
Silver print
Collection of the BNG
The continued development of the Ondaatje Wing continues to be generously supported by Sir Christopher Ondatje. The care of the Bermuda Collection is sponsored by Mr. Robert Steinhoff and the late Mrs. Pat Steinhoff.
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European Collection 1500-1900
The Watlington Room
The works currently on display are a cross section of the BNG's European Collection, including painting, sculpture, and furniture spanning the 16th through 19th centuries.
The European Collection began with and is based around a permanent collection of eighteen historic European paintings bequeathed to the people of Bermuda in 1989 by founding Trustee, the late Hon. Hereward T. Watlington (1902–1989). The Watlington Collection includes rare and valuable paintings from a number of well-known artists, such as Gainsborough and Reynolds, plus a wide array of works, mediums, and styles, ultimately presenting a glimpse into the history of European art.
Over the years the Gallery’s permanent collection has been complemented by significant long-term loans and additional contributions. It is with the generosity of collectors and the people of Bermuda that these works are presented.
