Bill Brandt

The 150-picture exhibition marking the centenary of Bill Brandt's birth in Hamburg.

(Edited highlights of the panel's review taken from the teletext subtitles that are generated live for Newsnight Review.)

NATASHA WALTER:
It is quite a wide range. It is so interesting to see so many images that have become really iconic collected together. What struck me walking around was how he does have such a great sense of theatricality. It is not surprising when he talked about the influence of Orson Welles on his work in the little documentary they show. You can really see that, about the influence of films like Citizen Cane, the deep perspectives and the contrasts. But even though you see that theatricality being worked on over and over again, you don't just get some kind of sense of artifice out of the photographs, especially the photographs I wasn't familiar with, these landscapes I didn't really associate with him, you do get a sense of a real emotional response to the landscape he is photographing, I think he does wonderfully, really responding to the wildness and bleakness of the British landscape in a way that not many photographers did. They were really wonderful and also when he put people in landscapes and explored their connection physically, to landscape, it does give this very big emotional charge.

LAWSON:
Tom Paulin, Natasha talks about theatricality, and his attitude to reality is interesting. Photographers quite often have a fixed attitude to reality, Cecil Beaton didn't care too much about reality. He varies fantastic photo journalism but surrealist images, images where he uses his friends and family as actors, it is a huge range of reality.

TOM PAULIN:
In some ways it is, but I think he is going for sculptural effect, so he wants to make people monumental. I think there is a lot of Cezanne in the photographs, you know, concentrated figures, monumental figures, a lot of German expressionism. I suppose Man Ray, a dreadfully overrated photographer, I think, but there are surreal moments. And at the same time what worried me was one called Top Withens, which I notice from the new biography, David Hockney, an admirer of Brandt's, got worried about it. He said this landscape is lit in the foreground but dark at the back, and then Hockney worked out it is actually two photographs put together. He did add bits, paint in little bits, but there he faked it. I think the one of Stonehenge is faked. The stones look plastic, or maybe he thought "actually I'm doing something that could be an image from the Third Reich, so I'll make it messy", you know, it is rebarbative.

LAWSON:
Well, his version was that he had waited years for that particular image. And he had clearly worked very hard, Kwame. He had TB and he had diabetes. There is a little side exhibition where they have a picture of him actually climbing up this gate to get an image, and you get a sense of how hard he worked to get the right angle.

KWAME KWEI-ARMAH:
It is interesting that he often said that anybody could have taken these photos. And actually, no, only you could have taken those photos. He had wonderful sensitivity I thought. Like a lot of the artists of that time, they kind of swung to the left, and I felt I was right there with him. I was particularly moved by the '30s, the miners and all of that kind of era. I was so moved by it, I felt like I was...

PAULIN:
Just a few of them, as it were, were left wing, but actually they're not really, I think. You know, he is not making political points very much, is he?

KWEI-ARMAH:
Well, I don't know if he is not making political points actually, I think the juxtaposition of the toffs and the miners, I think they are ...

PAULIN:
But it is a celebration of England, isn't it?

LAWSON:
I think he just wanted to get the range. I mean clearly himself he fancied the toff end rather than being a miner.

KWEI-ARMAH:
Yes, because I said that he swung to the left, doesn't mean that he actually was on the left. I just felt that by looking at those I found myself transported back to a time that's very easy to forget, and I celebrate that, I really enjoyed seeing that.

LAWSON:
I think the sense of time, because he quite often uses newspapers, there are newspapers lying on a step and a famous image, there is a Peter Sellers portrait where Sellers filming the Pink Panther is peeping out from behind a paper. It is almost like kidnappers use a photograph in a picture so you know exactly when the time was. The sense of time you get, because the backgrounds are so detailed, you see what kind of food people ate, what sort of clothes, what was on the walls.

WALTER:
Well that I think is maybe partly what gave me that sense of the cinematic in his work. You do feel that if he would have been a film director he would have been a feature director, not a documentary maker. There is that sense of wanting to stage things a bit.

KWEI-ARMAH:
I would agree there. Halifax, the one where he is on the station and you can see the kids running, and it is so beautifully composed that it is cinematic.

LAWSON:
It is that sense of where to put the camera. Even in the portraits he quite often, like a movie director, has the face down the front and then it's all background.

WALTER:
Yes, exactly. The other film director that he would remind me of is Hitchcock in the way he approaches women. He has that same, in a way they are slightly sadistic, the way he places the objects, particularly in the later work, but there's also this sense of the way he can dramatise his own feeling of being enthralled to their beauty and power, which I think is incredibly powerful.

LAWSON:
Can I just ask you on the women, whether this show in some ways sanitises him. In the biography which has come out, Paul Delaney, which is published to coincide with this, there is really a quite gruesome picture from late on of a nude woman who is masked and chained and bound. There were clearly darker things going on.

WALTER:
Yes, yes, I agree, it's incredibly problematic. And I don't know why they haven't shown them, because even if they are problematic, you want to see them in the range of the work.

PAULIN:
Yes, and even some of the earlier ones, some of the earlier nudes and more realistic ones, you feel there is a personal darkness as well as the darkness of the '30s.