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War and the Nude: The Photography of Bill Brandt in the 1940s

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Stephen Brooke
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Journal of British Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , January 2006 , pp. 118 - 138
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Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2006

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References

1 “Shelter Life,” Picture Post (London), 26 October 1940, 10–11Google ScholarPubMed.

2 Hayes, Nick, “An ‘English War’: Wartime Culture and ‘Millions Like Us,’” in British Culture in the Second World War, ed. Hayes, Nick and Hill, Jeff (Liverpool, 1999), 3Google Scholar; see also Calder, Angus, The People's War (London: 1969)Google Scholar; Hewison, Robert, Culture and Consensus: England, Art and Politics since 1940 (London, 1995)Google Scholar; Sinfield, Alan, Literature Politics and Culture in Postwar Britain (London, 1997)Google Scholar.

3 Eley, Geoff, “Finding the People's War: Film, British Collective Memory and World War Two,” American Historical Review 106 (2001): 821CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 All photographs referred to in the text without illustration can be found in Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt, ed. Kernot, John-Paul (New York, 1999)Google Scholar.

5 Brandt, Bill, “A Statement (1970),” in Bill Brandt: Selected Texts and Bibliography, ed. Warburton, Nigel (Oxford, 1993), 30Google Scholar.

6 Kuhn, Annette, Family Secrets (London, 1995), 34Google Scholar. The original remark is about the film Mandy (1952).

7 Eley, “Finding the People's War,” 833.

8 Rose, Sonya, Which People's War? (Oxford, 2003), 25Google Scholar.

9 Hopkinson, Tom, “Bill Brandt Photographer,” Lilliput (London) 10, no. 8 (August 1942): 141Google Scholar.

10 See, e.g., Trachtenberg, Alan, Reading American Photographs (New York, 1989)Google Scholar; Guimond, James, American Photography and the American Dream (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991)Google Scholar; Hamilton, Peter, “Representing the Social: France and Frenchness in Post War Humanist Photography,” in Representations: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices, ed. Hall, Stuart (London, 1999)Google Scholar; Ryan, James, Picturing Empire: Photography and the Visualization of the British Empire (Chicago, 1997)Google Scholar; Terence Ranger, “Colonialism, Consciousness and the Camera,” Past and Present, no. 171 (2001): 203–15.

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16 Mulvey, Laura, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington, IN, 1989), 14–28CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Mulvey just as famously revised her views to argue that female spectators can partake of the same power of the gaze; in other words, that narrative cinema can position male and female spectators in the same way. See “Afterthoughts on ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun (1946),” in ibid., 29–38.

17 For Brandt's early life, see Delany, Paul, Bill Brandt (Stanford, CA, 2004)Google Scholar.

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21 See James, Peter and Sadler, Richard, eds., Homes Fit for Heroes: Photography by Bill Brandt, 1939–43 (Stockport, 2004)Google Scholar.

22 Except where noted, Brandt wrote captions and copy for his photographs himself.

23 Brandt, Bill, “Soho: Eight Bits of a Quarter,” Lilliput 10, no. 4 (April 1942): 325, 330Google Scholar.

24 See Brandt and Henry Moore pictures in Lilliput 10, no. 11 (November 1942): 473–80Google Scholar; “Bill Brandt—Photographer,” Lilliput 10, no. 8 (August 1942): 130–40Google Scholar.

25 This is also a feature of Humphrey Jenning's film London Can Take It (1940).

26 Lilliput 10, no. 11 (November 1942): 480, 478Google ScholarPubMed.

27 Lilliput, 8, no. 7 (July 1941): 62Google Scholar.

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29 Bill Brandt, “A Photographer's London,” in Warburton, ed., Bill Brandt, 85, 91.

30 Rupert Martin, “War Work,” in Warburton, ed., Bill Brandt, 50.

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33 “The Threat to the Great Roman Wall,” Picture Post 21, no. 4 (23 October 1943): 12–15Google Scholar; see also Jeffery, Ian, introduction to his Bill Brandt: Photographs, 1929–1983 (London, 1993), 30Google Scholar.

34 Warburton, Nigel, “Bill Brandt's Cathedral Interiors,” History of Photography 17 (1993): 263–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

35 “Bath: What the Germans Mean By a ‘Baedeker Raid,’” Picture Post, 4 July 1942.

36 Jeffery, introduction, 30. There is a link here with the concurrent New Apocalypse movement in literature represented by writers such as Henry Treece. See Bergonzi, Bernard, Wartime and Aftermath (Oxford, 1993), 57–58Google Scholar.

37 Lilliput, 10, no. 4 (April 1942): 326.

38 See Lant, Antonia, Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema (Princeton, NJ, 1991)Google Scholar; Gledhill, Christine and Swanson, Gillian, eds., Nationalising Femininity (Manchester, 1996)Google Scholar.

39 See Bill Brandt: Photographs, 1928–1983, 97.

40 Lilliput, 10, no. 4 (April 1942): 224–25Google ScholarPubMed.

41 On Rose-Pulham, see Williams, Val, ed., Too Short a Summer: The Photographs of Peter Rose Pulham, 1910–1956 (York, 1979)Google Scholar.

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43 Quoted in the BBC television production, Masters (1983).

44 The later nudes were published as A Perspective of Nudes (London, 1961)Google Scholar.

45 Hiley, Michael quoted in Brandt, Bill, Nudes, 1945–80 (Boston, 1980), 7Google Scholar.

46 Mellor, David, “Brandt's Phantasms,” in Bill Brandt: Behind the Camera; Photographs, 1928–1983 (New York, 1985), 85Google Scholar.

47 Delany, Bill Brandt, chap. 23.

48 Pultz, The Body and the Lens, 67.

49 Bate, Photography and Surrealism, 29.

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53 Jeffery, introduction, 38.

54 Armstrong, Carol, “The Reflexive and Possessive View: Thoughts on Kertesz, Brandt and the Photographic Nude,” Representations 25 (1989): 55, 68Google Scholar. On this point, see also Scundell, Margaret, “Vanishing Points: The Photography of Francesca Woodman,” in Inside the Visible, ed. de Zegher, M. Catherine (Cambridge, MA, 1996)Google Scholar.

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56 Bill Brandt, “Notes on Perspective of Nudes,” (1961), reprinted in Warburton, ed., Bill Brandt, 122, 121.

57 See Brandt, Bill, Portraits: Photographs by Bill Brandt (London, 1982)Google Scholar.

58 Quoted in Mark Haworth-Booth's introduction to Behind the Camera, 12.

59 See Matless, David, Landscape and Englishness (London, 1998)Google Scholar.

60 See Rose, Which People's War? chap. 6.

61 See Brandt, Bill, Literary Britain (London, 1951)Google Scholar.

62 Brandt, Portraits, 9.

63 Krauss, “Corpus Delicti,” 85.

64 Bell, Amy, “London Was Ours: Diaries and Memories of the London Blitz” (PhD thesis, Queen's University, Kingston, Canada, 2003), chap. 2, 36Google Scholar.

65 Bate, Photography and Surrealism, 200.

66 Kuhn, Family Secrets, 23, 24.

67 See, e.g., Cowie, Elizabeth, “Film Noir and Women,” in Shades of Noir, ed. Copjec, Joan (London, 1993), 121–66Google Scholar; Krutnik, Frank, In a Lonely Street: Film Noir, Genre and Masculinity (London, 1991)Google Scholar.

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71 Conekin, Becky, Mort, Frank, and Waters, Chris, eds., introduction to Moments of Modernity (London, 1999), 11Google Scholar.

72 Bowen, Elizabeth, The Heat of the Day (1949; Harmondsworth, 1961), 92Google Scholar.

73 Ibid., 7.

74 Ibid., 166.

75 Ibid., 195. On this, see also Ellman, Maud, Elizabeth Bowen: The Shadow across the Page (Edinburgh, 2003), 153Google Scholar.

76 Bowen, Elizabeth, “Postscript to The Demon Lover (1945),” in The Mulberry Tree, ed. Lee, Hermoine (London, 1999), 95Google Scholar.

77 Elizabeth Bowen, “London, 1940,” in Lee, ed., The Mulberry Tree, 23.

78 Bowen, “Postscript to The Demon Lover,” 96. See also Rose, Jacqueline, “Bizarre Objects: Mary Butts and Elizabeth Bowen,” Critical Quarterly 42 (2000): 75–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

79 Rose, “Bizarre Objects,” 78.

80 Greene, Graham, The Ministry of Fear (1943; Harmondsworth, 1963), 30, 67Google Scholar.

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82 Green, Henry, Caught (1943; London, 2001), 95–96Google ScholarPubMed.

83 Ibid., 94, vii.

84 See Stansky, Peter and Abrahams, William, London's Burning (London, 1994)Google Scholar; for the postwar period, see essays in Fyrth, Jim, ed., Labour's Promised Land: Culture and Society in Labour Britain, 1945–51 (London, 1995), pt. 3Google Scholar.

85 Quoted in Spalding, Frances, British Art since 1900 (London, 1986), 145Google Scholar.