Photographer Bill Brandt found beauty in romantic gloom

One of my favorite photos, wrote Bill Brandtis Top Withens on the Yorkshire Moors (1945). We see an abandoned ruin, unapproachable on a mountain. The sky is threatening, you can almost feel that lashing winter storm that has just passed. Brandt had already driven here in the summer of 1944 to photograph the landscape where Emily Brontë probably found inspiration for her Wuthering Heights† But: too nice weather, too much sun, too many tourists. “I preferred fog, rain, solitude in November,” Brandt wrote, “but I wasn’t satisfied until I saw it again, in February. I took the photo just after a hail storm, when a strong wind was blowing over the Moors.”

The photo of British photographer Bill Brandt hangs in the exhibition The Beautiful and the Sinister in Foam in Amsterdam, and shows his preference for the dark side of life – photography noir, his work is also called. Brandt sought beauty mainly in a romantic gloom – think ominous weather conditions, poorly lit streets, drizzled cobblestones at night. We see it in the narrow alleys in pre-war England, smoking factory chimneys, men smoking under a street lamp in a dark, deserted London street.

Also see Bill Brandt, master of photography noir

‘uncanny’

Bill Brandt (1904-1983) was born Hermann Wilhelm Brandt in Hamburg, to a wealthy family. As a child he contracted tuberculosis and was sent by his parents first to Switzerland and then to Vienna, where he received treatment based on psychoanalysis developed by Freud. He had used the term ‘umheimlich’ for the first time, for experiences that feel ominous and oppressive. The influence this had on Brandt was reinforced when he was subsequently able to work for several months in Paris in 1929 as an assistant to the photographer Man Ray and was introduced by him to his surrealist friends.

Brandt’s preference for alienating, eerie and mysterious images originated here, and would remain apparent in almost all of his work over the next five decades from his new homeland of England, where he settled in 1934. In his documentary photography: the upstairs-downstairs in hierarchical England, Londoners hiding in the tube before the German bombings, the soot-stained faces of the miners in Halifax, Newcastle and Durham. In his portraits: the darkness of Francis Bacon on Primrose Hill in London, Dylan Thomas in a bar (“Don’t smile, you look stupid”, was Brandt’s motto when he made portraits). In his nudes, in which he created alienating, distorted compositions with close-ups of buttocks, legs, breasts and backs. And in his landscapes, which often look just as abstract, with many curves and organic shapes.

Modest sizes

In Foam, the vintage prints, printed by Brandt himself at the time he took the photos, hang on the wall in modest formats and tightly framed in white frames. It is a classic way of presenting a classic photographer, which invites you to concentrate. Unlike many photo exhibitions today, which offer a kind of total experience, with blown-up prints and a multimedia presentation (via screens, canvases, installations, objects), here you are forced to slow down and focus on the spectacle in the image itself. Despite the large number of photos, 180 in total, the exhibition feels compact, almost oppressive even, which is very appropriate given Brandt’s theme and style.

Because you as a viewer are right on top of it, it is also clearly visible how much Brandt edited his photos. In Barmaid at the Crooked Billet, Tower Hill (1939) we see how he tightened the contours of the barmaid’s face, her eyes and eyebrows and made her arms a bit slimmer with Conté chalk. Brandt used a wide variety of retouching techniques and was not afraid to merge two elements from different negatives in the darkroom. Not every dark cloud, not every plume of smoke from a dirty factory, was there at that moment. The lone lantern atop the hill for which Francis Bacon posed? That was added later. For some people that’s disappointing – pictures and the truth and all that. Brandt would never win a photojournalistic award with images like this – there are strict rules for image editing. But, Brandt said: “It’s the result that counts, and then it doesn’t matter how it’s achieved.” Brandt was therefore never about ‘the absolute truth’, but much more about how he who saw.