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printing was often excessively dark and moody, later by theincreasing contrast with which he printed his work, at times virtuallyreducing pictures to simple black and white. Climate was also a featurein a list of pictures, notably some of his British landscapes such ashis picture of Avebury`s ancient stones in mist. During wartimeblackout, he worked with long night exposures of London by moonlight,and at the end of the war in a series `The Magic Lantern of a Car`sHeadlights` caught people, a rabbit, trees and grave markers.

Dreams His medical treatment continued with extensive sessions ofpsychoanalysis in Vienna with Wilhelm Stekel whose over-literal andhighly symbolic interpretations of dreams evoked Freud`s derision. Muchof Brandt`s art can be seen in price of the use of symbols, andin order to do so more freely he often displaces them from context. Theinterest in dreams was reinforced by his links with Surrealism; whenhis family had decided that, given his miserable health, photography might bea suitable career (or interest) for him, they paying for him to spendseveral months in Paris at the studio of Man Ray (he had photographed Ezra Pound who had provided an entry to Ray). Here he came into touch with a bit of the Surrealists and likewise with the process of photographers such as Brassai, Kertesz and the lately deceased Eugene Atget. One of Brandt`s most curious picture stories for Video Post,`The Man Who Found Himself Only in London`(1947) is a surrealist fablein which a man wakes up to get himself all unique in a Londonenmeshed in fog; he gets on his bike and cycles to the river to endit all.

Brandt`s first major work, The English at Home, published in 1936 contrasted social extremes in class-ridden English society.The photographs in this were reinforced by Brandt on ideas from a variety ofsources - including photographs from the popular magazine Weekly Illustrated - and were mainly though not obviously painstakingly set up by thephotographer. The word did not impress either critics or public and wasquickly remaindered. Brandt was himself working for Weekly Illustrated at this time, although it is frequently hard to discover his influence as many projects involved a list of photographers.

His second book, A Night in London (1938), was modelled very loosely on Brassai`s famous `Paris de Nuit (1933)` again involves a serial of carefully posed scenes, often using friends and family as actors to set up scenes in back alleys.Following this, Brandt moved from Weekly Illustrated to Picture Post, for whom he was to create many of his better known pictures, although he also worked at the same sentence for the more racy Lilliput. Brandt`s planning of his pictures is well-illustrated by the tale told by one of his editors at Picture Post;he had been sent from London to Liverpool to shoot an old seacaptain; on his fall the editor looked at his mark and commented howlucky he had been that the man had such an appropriate oil lamp in thecorner of his room. Brandt replied that it was not luck, he had takenthe lamp with him for the picture. His association with Picture Post continued until the early 1950′s when he was sent to photograph inrun-down inner-city Glasgow; the pictures he sent backwards from the Gorbalswere almost abstract surrealist architectural landscapes reminiscent of De Chirico; Bert Hardy was now sent to supersede him, producing a well-known exposure of scruffy urchins on the street.

Lilliput led Brandt in a bit of new directions, notably inportraiture and the nude, as good as providing most of the act for `Literary Britain`.Brandt`s best portraits - usually of artists, musicians or writers -situate their subjects in a setting that link in some way to theirwork. A number were also taken for the London Harpers Bazaar.The nudes, begun for Lilliput, continued as a private obsession, taking the genre into new areas with his use of an extreme wideangle camera and the inevitable distortion this produces in closeup. Originally he used a wooden camera designedfor recording scenes of crime, although later work was taken with awide-angle Hasselblad.

One see by Brandt has become an almost universal symbol of the impression of the 1930′s. His Coal Searcher shows a man bent low pushing his wheel up a little incline toward thephotographer. The landscape through which he is trudging is dark andempty grass, a modest field of blue sky above the high horizon. He movesalong a clear path against which the photographer has exactly framedhim. A sack slumps across his crossbar, only partially full, containing theresults of his day of scratching for tiny lumps of coal discarded on thewaste heaps. Despite his position their is a determination - ifresigned - about his activity.

Brandt continued to shoot until shortly before his destruction in 1983,although lots of his late work often seems a poor repetition of hisearlier ideas, there is an occasional spark. He lived to see collectorspaying respectable sums for his prints, often for those that were onlyintended as a reference for the platemakers of the magazines for which heworked. At the time when he made his better work, his net product camefrom a printing press not an enlarger; in many ways the true Brandt ismore present in the original copies of Illustrated or Picture Post - and in the reproductions in books - than in the pictures you will see on the bulwark of the show.