Hostname: page-component-5c6d5d7d68-lvtdw Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-16T13:32:45.977Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 December 2012

Stephen Brooke
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Articles
Information
Journal of British Studies , Volume 45 , Issue 1 , January 2006 , pp. 118 - 138
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference of British Studies 2006

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

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.

11 See Pultz, John, The Body and the Lens: Photography 1839 to the Present (New York, 1995)Google Scholar; Clarke, Graham, The Photograph (Oxford, 1997)Google Scholar.

12 See Clark, Kenneth, The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art (1956; Harmondsworth, 1985)Google Scholar.

13 Berger, John, Ways of Seeing (Harmondsworth, 1972), 45–64Google Scholar.

14 See Cooper, Emmanuel, Male Bodies: A Photographic History of the Nude (Munich, 2002)Google Scholar.

15 Nead, Lynda, “The Female Nude: Pornography, Art, and Sexuality,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 15, no. 2 (1990): 334, 326CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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.

18 Walker, Ian, “Phantom Africa: Photography between Surrealism and Ethnography,” Cahiers d’Études Africaines 147, no. 28 (1997): 636, 651Google Scholar. On the tensions of documentary photography, see Taylor, John, A Dream of England (Manchester, 1994), chap. 5Google Scholar.

19 Hayes, Charles, “Bill Brandt's Documentary Fiction,” Artforum 24, no. 1 (September 1985): 112Google Scholar.

20 Delany, Bill Brandt, 91. See also Howells, Richard, “Self Portrait: The Sense of Self in British Documentary Photography,” National Identities 4 (2002): 104–5CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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.

28 Lilliput, 10, no. 8 (August 1942): 134Google ScholarPubMed.

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.

31 Bate, David, Photography and Surrealism: Sexuality, Colonialism and Social Dissent (London, 2004), 199Google Scholar.

32 Lilliput, 10, no. 11 (November 1942): 482Google ScholarPubMed.

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.

42 See, e.g., “Memories of Things Past,” Lilliput 10, no. 1 (January 1942): 16Google Scholar; “She Sells Sea Shells …,” Lilliput 10, no. 5 (May 1942): 354Google Scholar.

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.

50 Krauss, Rosalind, “Corpus Delicti,” in Krauss, Rosalind and Livingstone, Jane, L’Amour Fou: Photography and Surrealism (Washington, DC, 1985), 95Google Scholar.

51 Park, Bertram and Gregory, Yvonne, The Beauty of the Female Form (London, 1935), viiGoogle Scholar.

52 See Davidor, Judith Fryer, Women's Camera Work (Durham, NC, 1998)Google Scholar for a discussion of women's gaze in photography in the twentieth century.

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.

55 Berger, John, “Arts in Society: The Uses of Photography,” New Society (London) 8, no. 211 (13 October 1966): 582–83Google Scholar.

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.

68 Landy, Marcia, “Melodrama and Femininity in Second World War British Cinema,” in The British Cinema Book, ed. Murphy, Robert (London, 2001), 125Google Scholar.

69 Eley, “Finding the People's War,” 821.

70 Rose, Sonya, “Sex, Citizenship and the Nation in World War II Britain,” American Historical Review 103 (1998), 1147–76Google Scholar; see also Rose, Which People's War? Lant, Blackout: Reinventing Women for Wartime British Cinema; Lake, Marilyn, “Female Desires: The Meaning of World War 2,” Australian Historical Studies 21, no. 95 (October 1990): 267–84Google Scholar; Gillian Swanson, “‘So Much Money and So Little to Spend It On’: Morale, Consumption and Sexuality,” in Gledhill and Swanson, eds., Nationalising Femininity, 70–90.

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.

81 Greene, Graham, The End of the Affair (1951; Harmondsworth, 1975), 57Google Scholar.

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.