In the early 1970s, at the dusk of both of their lives, Cecil Beaton told Bill Brandt: “‘I consider you to be the greatest living English photographer’” (9). Brandt (1904–83) was the leading British photographer of the twentieth century and a major presence in world photography. His images have also shaped our perception of twentieth-century Britain. German by birth and upbringing, Brandt settled in England when he was thirty. He published The English at Home in 1936 (London) and A Night in London in 1938 (London). Both offered startling visual reflections upon nation and city. It was in the thirties that Brandt produced some of his most iconic photographs, such as “A Snicket in Halifax” and the poignantly joyous picture of an East End girl doing the Lambeth Walk. By the war years, Brandt's photographs had become a familiar feature of the growing stable of English pictorial magazines, such as Weekly Illustrated, Lilliput, and Picture Post. No other artist captured the night of wartime London with such power as Brandt, whether showing moonlit Bloomsbury's still streets, the dark dome of St. Paul's arising from rubble, or the huddle of bodies sheltering from the Blitz in the Underground. After the Second World War, he abandoned documentary photography, focusing instead upon portraiture, landscape, and, most importantly, the nude. The publication of Literary Britain (London, 1951) and Perspective of Nudes (London) ten years later confirmed Brandt's status as a major visual artist.

Brandt's life and work have also been veiled in mystery. “Mystery was in Bill,” remarked his friend and editor, Tom Hopkinson, “and he projected it on whatever he photographed” (9). The arc of his artistic trajectory certainly defies easy categorization. At first glance, Brandt's photographs of the 1930s seem firmly within a documentary tradition, representing the social reality of interwar Britain as a spur to social change. The English at Home was organized around the blunt contrast between rich and poor, while the affective power of some of Brandt's greatest pictures of the industrial north and London lay in their portrayal of the everyday struggles of working-class people. But his later artistic reputation (and self-definition) rested upon work that turned forcefully away from the real or the social. Instead, especially with the nude studies, Brandt's photographs often featured the deliberate distortion of the specular field and drew upon a private and largely ineffable mythology. There was a discernible trace of regret and admonition in John Berger's observation in New Society (13 October 1966) that these later photographs represented a “withdrawal into … the problem of a few private verities. … Everything has been sacrificed to Brandt's private purpose.”

Another mystery in Brandt's life and work was his relationship to the city and nation of his adoption. Even after the move away from documentary photography, a fascination with London and with Britain remained at the heart of his work. He produced a series of striking portraits of the country's literary and artistic élite from the 1940s to the 1970s as well as dramatic meditations on its landscape. That this was an outsider's gaze is not remarkable in itself. It was, after all, a Swiss photographer, Robert Frank, who created some of the most enduring portraits of Eisenhower's America. Unlike Frank, however, Brandt tried hard to be an insider, to submerge his own European identity in a staged Englishness. Ironically, his legacy may have been the gift of a European sensibility to the photographic representation of Britain in the twentieth century.

Brandt did little to dispel the mystery around him. Indeed, he fabricated important facts about his own life, including, for example, the place of his birth. Unlike Cecil Beaton, he left few personal records beyond his photographs. In the first formal biography of Brandt, Paul Delany attempts to lift the shroud of secretiveness from his subject. He has done invaluable research on Brandt, including conducting interviews with many of those close to Brandt. Criticisms can be made of Delany's approach, but the biography still stands as an important study of one of the major figures of British visual culture in the twentieth century.

Delany makes sense of Brandt's artistic development by stressing his lifelong engagement with the private self rather than the public world. According to Delany, Brandt's work was primarily shaped by idiosyncratic psychological and sexual obsessions. The biography thus favors a psychoanalytical, rather than social, interpretation of Brandt's photographs. Following this view, private stories eclipsed public narratives in Brandt's “documentation” of interwar and wartime Britain. This is not a new insight—other scholars of Brandt such as David Mellor and Ian Jeffery have also pointed to the psychological roots of Brandt's documentary work, noting, for example, how he staged scenes—but Delany is to be congratulated for providing an admirably sustained reflection on the theme. Brandt's representation of London and Britain was an explicit theme of his work from the publication of The English at Home and A Night in London in the 1930s to Literary Britain in the 1950s. Delany suggests that we should not take these photographs as documents of social reality but, rather, as subjective constructions of an imagined London and Britain. This was wrapped up in Brandt's own attempt to become English. Brandt was born, raised, and educated in Germany, but in a family with English roots. During the First World War, Brandt's father suffered the indignity of internment by the German authorities because of his English birth. This deeply alienated Brandt. Once in England, he set about creating himself as an Englishmen, casting off his German and European identity. Later in life, he refused to speak German even to members of his family and reacted violently when referred to as a “middle-European” artist. Becoming English did not mean representing the nation in his photographs so much as forging an England of his imagination: “[Brandt] wanted to be English, and really belong to the fairy-tale island. This meant inventing a new identity for himself … but also inventing an England that would satisfy his childhood fantasies” (91). Again, Delany suggests a private rather than social meaning of his pictures of the land, architecture, and people of Britain.

Delany's psychoanalytical interpretation of Brandt's work is persuasive in many respects. Anyone familiar with the nude studies will agree, in particular, that these pictures are not only explorations of form and composition, but dreamlike, and indeed often nightmarish voyages into the unconscious. But unlocking the door to Brandt's secret room remains a difficult task. Even armed with a psychoanalytical approach, Brandt's pictures frustrate interpretation. Delany sometimes ventures a speculation too far in his efforts to prise meaning from Brandt's life and work.

This is especially true of the early chapters on Brandt's family and childhood. Reflecting upon the possible sexual dynamics of Brandt's household in pre-1914 Germany, for example, Delany moves from an observation that a “nanny might be a pretty and submissive girl, whose affection for her charges could easily catch the eye of her master” (17) to the suggestion, made softly at first, and then with increasing authority, that Brandt's father had an affair with his nanny, precipitating a childhood trauma with all the usual Freudian consequences. The actual evidence for any such affair is sketchy at best, based upon one very ambiguous comment made by Brandt's brother. When Freud flags, Thomas Mann is brought in as a reliable interpreter of Brandt's social position, education and upbringing: “to understand the social position of the Brandts, one turns to Thomas Mann” (15). Does one? Are there not other works available on the upper middle classes of early twentieth-century Germany? That Brandt truly loathed the work of Thomas Mann makes this kind of biographical analysis all the more discomforting. To have one's character analyzed through the prism of novels one despises must be an irritation that smarts even beyond the grave. We can only hope that Brandt liked Robert Musil's Young Törless since it serves as a guide to bullying during his schooldays. The point of all this is Delany's suggestion that, in his childhood, “something happened” (21) to leave Brandt nursing a sense of trauma and suffering. This was deepened, when, as a young man, he spent time in a tuberculosis sanitorium (cue Magic Mountain), followed by a spell of analysis.

Delany is much more compelling on Brandt's development as a photographer in the late twenties and early thirties, tracing the influence of psychoanalysis, surrealism, and sexual experience on Brandt's gaze. These helped create the esoteric symbolism that distinguished his pictures even in the 1930s and encouraged a particular photographic approach. Unlike Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brandt was never an inspired thief of the “decisive moment” but, rather, the architect of carefully composed and manipulated pictures. Thus, when he turned away from formal documentary work in the 1940s, it was less a departure than the fuller realization of an earlier vision.

Delany's attempt to read the “open secret” (287) of Brandt's work from the 1930s to the 1970s makes for a rich study. His emphasis on a psychoanalytic approach to the photographs is a useful warning against a reductive and misleading appropriation of Brandt's work as a “true” representation of social or historical reality. After all, the photograph of the Lambeth Walk girl was used by Picture Post in two quite different ways, first, as an illustration accompanying a proposal for a “new deal for youth” built on modern, progressive leisure programs, then, contradictorily, as a nostalgic evocation of the good old days when children played in the streets, this time in a call for road safety. But we should also be wary of only relying upon a psychoanalytical approach or shying away from a social reading of some of Brandt's work. After all, what is said of Brandt could be said, in varying degrees, of all social documentarians: construction and creation are always part of representation and documentation. George Orwell's Road to Wigan Pier has to be read as a subjective journey as well as an exercise in the reproduction of reality.

While acknowledging the importance of a private vision in Brandt's work, we might still see that throughout his life, his photographs reflected not only an England of his imagination, but something of the society itself, a view enabled, rather than diffused, by Brandt's personal obsessions and European sensibilities. The play between darkness and light that haunted Brandt's own narratives and fantasies also documented the luminescent cityscape of interwar modernity, as James Bone said in the original preface to A Night in London: “Floodlit attics and towers, oiled roadways shining like enamel under the street lights and headlights, the bright lacquer and shining metals of motorcars, illuminated signs.” One of the strengths of his photography from the 1930s is also that he captured the divisions and hierarchies of that society without ignoring its ambiguities and complexities. In an extraordinary series of pictures of sociability and sexual desire taken in Charlie Brown's bar in Soho in the late 1930s and 1940s, Brandt complicated the rigid binaries of British society by showing an England in which defiance and transgression were as present as deference and conformity, a world in which Londoners could break out of the class, racial, and sexual boundaries around them. In these photographs and others, the varied aesthetic and intellectual influences on Brandt's photography, such as psychoanalysis, children's books, Surrealism, German Expressionist film, and the cinematography of Gregg Toland, not only gave voice to his own private narratives but also helped bring into focus the dark margins and ambiguous interiors of English life. Brandt furnished the representation of modern Britain with a psychological and sexual depth. His preoccupations may have been private, but his photographs also resonate with the work of other artists and writers. Walter Sickert and Gustave Doré are obvious progenitors in terms of visual art, but comparison might also be made in this regard between Brandt's England and that of contemporaries such as Graham Greene and Elizabeth Bowen in literature, and David Lean and Carol Reed in cinema, if we think of films such as Oliver Twist (1951) and Odd Man Out (1947).

More attention might also be given to how Brandt represented Britain after the Second World War. This is a theme given less consideration in the existing literature. We might reflect, for example, on how the portraits and landscapes act as a counternarrative to the image of an affluent, consensual Brave New World in the 1950s and 1960s. Brandt's photographs instead map a dark and sometimes confrontational Britain. The famous portraits of Francis Bacon on Primrose Hill and Harold Pinter in Battersea are studies in isolation and alienation, accentuated by backgrounds made forbidding by their composition and the use of high contrast. A less well-known, but equally powerful photograph of Celia Johnston, recently featured in a 2004 exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery, is a disconcerting reflection of angst and quiet devastation. Such pictures wind an existential strain through a collective portrait of postwar society. Brandt's landscapes also confront rather than comfort the viewer. Given that Brandt worked in black and white, his Britain is of course not green, but neither is it a pleasant land. Instead, it is a country of wildness and darkness. The stark tones of land, rock, and sea in these pictures are a natural complement to his earlier photographs of the manmade industrial north. The nudes are often considered the least “social” of all his photographs. Of course, we should not forget that they are studies in form and explorations of personal psychosexual concerns. But they might also be read, in the context of the 1940s and 1950s, as explorations of libidinal desire, outside the bounds of a society that was increasingly promoting a normalized and therapeutic heterosexuality. Like his portraits and landscapes, Brandt's nudes serve as a counterpoint to images of a reformed and consensual Britain of the postwar period: within the frame of these photographs moved an unruly and uncontrollable nation, one with a dark psychological center. Delany's biography reminds us of the enigmatic power of Brandt's art.