PHOTOGRAPHY: STUDY AND ANALYSIS

 For Brandt, the 1960s did not come as any kind of personal liberation; rather, they marked the collapse of the project he had worked on since he had come to England 30 years before. The publication of Shadow Of Light in 1966, a selection of his best pictures in all genres, set the seal on his reputation as the dean of English photographers - an artist rather than a reporter in the view of Cyril Connolly, who wrote the book's introduction. But 1966 was also the year of Antonioni's Blow-Up, a tribute to the new photographic scene of "swinging London". Brandt was in partial eclipse from the late 1960s until his death, taking mostly portraits and excluded from the fashionable photojournalism of the Sunday supplements. He was an unusual émigré in that he was free from the traditional afflictions of nostalgia and loss of roots. For him, there was no feeling of self-division. He never returned to Germany after 1933, and refused to speak his native language. He brought his neurosis with him to England in 1934 and it continued to possess him, in spite of his physical removal from the place that had spawned it. Some things can be preserved by being taken out of their time altogether, such as Brandt's landscapes and formal nudes. But for most of his pictures, the time of their taking is of the essence; and they can deliver that time to us today. Brandt's pictures of the 1930s arose from his special perspective: London as seen from Paris and Vienna. But as time did its sifting, they became everybody's 1930s. Over and over again, the history of art shows how the extraordinary vision of a culture ends up being the typical one.

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