Bill Brandt – tom stappers

Nov 10

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rise and fall of the fisheye

By Tom | photography

It was January 1970 when suddenly I felt like doing something very seventyish (and that’s what is still feels like). I guess it’s because technical development such as calculating complex lens systems by using computers became available. The dawning of drugs driven hippie awareness and the need to express accompanying new visual and mental states hitherto unknown somehow helped a great deal in introducing that new phenomenon: the fisheye. I did not really need one, but was eager to explore its possibilities. So I bought one I could afford; it wasn’t very sharp, but did “the magic”.

Thinking back I recently tried to remember what I used it for. I only remembered a few subjects and in fact no remaining results. So I looked it up in my old negatives. And there it was: believe it or not, the first thing I did was a funeral. Although I was serious about it, I felt uneasy using it, because of all the attention I was getting. The results were eerie, the funeral looked like some incomprehensible happening with extraterrestrians swarming around. Then I photographed caravans near a football stadium: more ET-activities and distorted faces. Then a series of nudes, which turned out more acceptable since that subject historically has had its share of distortion (Kertész, Brandt), offering a way to accentuate shapes and spaces. Fortunately the negatives I have made in London during that period, as well as the Kralingen (Rotterdam) Popfestival are without the fisheye, as are a large series of French gypsies. Some fisheye pictures of architecture, a few sparse portraits and some nature/landscape experiments were the last results before the fiseye was ultimately forgotten. I sold it soon afterwards…

May 10

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the truth and nothing but

By Tom | photography

So Doisneau used family members as actors in his photographs. “The kiss” is certainly no spontaneous action observed by a quickly reacting photographer, it was planned and staged! And yes, the gentleman standing on the running board of a late night London cab doesn’t only resemble Bill Brandt, it’s his brother. Even Capa’s falling soldier in Spain acted out his “dying”, as is proven by several takes of this “shot” with the same background (the original negatives surfaced not long ago in a trunk on somebody’s attic!). And I could go on… Is this “a sin against the principles, even the true nature of photography” as I hear some people arguing, even those who have no problem with Photoshop and the likes being applied with far less grace and taste…

A description is always true to itself, why are we so harsh on photographs that betray our preconception that a photograph, especially a classic one, should be representative, truthful and unmanipulated. Maybe because we want a photograph to fulfill the role we demand from it that it should have a narrative function. We want dearly to read a so-called meaning into it, in fact a “story” to comfort us. But is there life beyond the frame? Sure, but we sometimes make it up in our craving for explanations, if not easy solutions. We have to accept some photographs as icons, they do exist on their own, creating their own symbolic “truth” irrespective of context. What you get is not necessarily what you (hope to) see.

Feb 25

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Bill Brandt: description and story-telling

By Tom | photography

“Throughout his career, Brandt used photographs to tell stories, and London in the Thirties is a collection of three stories.” The well-known photobook by Bill Brandt from which I cite, contains 96 photographs, showing in 3 chapters his pictures of a vanishing class society in what was later to become the “A day in the life of…” -style. His observations of both high and low class Londoners are individually strong images of iconic value, which in their combination tell the story of a society holding on to old values and traditions which are bound to change. The photographs describe, their juxtapositions tell a story…

quote: © Mark Haworth-Booth, Victoria and Albert Museum, London: introduction to Bill Brandt: London in the Thirties” (Pantheon Books, New York 1984)

Feb 24

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a Bill Brandt interview

By Tom | photography

I looked up this old tape I had with a Bill Brandt interview. The sound had deteriorated some, but then he did not talk much. Bill Brandt, then already an old man, was not just a gentleman, but a gentle man. Soft-spoken, almost shy, he looked at his own photographs as if he had not seen them for a long time, reliving the moments of their taking, but without sentimentality. Looking at each picture for a long time he remembers the circumstances, the light mainly. Composition: that’s how it was, what it looked like – almost an excuse. “Decisive moment?” – there is a naughty boyish smile on his face – “sounds like Cartier-Bresson”, he says, “no, I don’t believe in that.” Several times he remarked that his nudes were his favorite photographs, but at the time nobody liked them. He was fascinated by playing with perspective, such as including the ceilings of rooms and the optical deformation of parts of the female body done with a special camera with a wide-angle lens. He tried color, but did not like it. When the portraits come by, he is surprised by the remark that almost every person is placed very excentrical: “O, really, I hadn’t noticed that” and starts checking. A very modest man indeed.

Dec 31

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personal interpretation, anything goes

By Tom | photography

When the great Bill Brandt learned about the poem that Ralph Mills had written about one of his photographs (the famous “Ear on the Beach”,1957)

he wrote back: “This is my favourite photograph, and I thought I knew the picture, but your poem has taught me to look at it quite differently. I am delighted.” Everyone is entitled to his own interpretation. Happy 2010.