LIFE STUDIES

Bill Brandt fashioned our view of England in the Thirties and Forties. A cache of hitherto unpublished photographs confirms his singular stature

BILL BRANDT is one of the most mysterious photographers of English society. Born in Germany in 1904, he settled in London in the Thirties, and immediately set about creating an England of his own.

He is often thought of as a social reporter, but he once said that his main artistic influence came from the English-language children's books he had looked at as a child in Hamburg. His finest photographs recall the poster-like lithographic illustrations of that period, with strong lines, and sharp contrasts of light and shade. They have the attractive simplicity of a nursery rhyme.

He had a wide-ranging hidden agenda. An ex-TB patient, he gave sunlight a magical power in his pictures; the dark side of society is literally that. In one of the recently-recovered photographs shown here, a girl gets washed at a sink in a gloomy room. Only the bright window offers any hope.

The pictures shown on these pages form part of an exhibition, Rebuilding the Home Front: Bill Brandt c1943, that begins on 4 December at Central Library, Chamberlain Square, Birmingham. They were found in late 1993 in an album in the files of the Bournville Village Trust, in Birmingham. The Cadbury family's pioneering model village at Bournville was long seen as the way working-class housing ought to go: plenty of space, gardens, no pubs. So, in 1943, as the British began to think that they might win the war, its governing Trust brought out an optimistic series of books called "Changing Britain". The Brandt pictures may have been meant for it, but they weren't used. They were found pasted into a loose-leaf foolscap file with a modest maroon cover.

Most of these pictures are of Birmingham slums, or, (from 1939) of corporation housing estates. (None are of Bourn-ville itself.) Some, however, were taken not in Birmingham at all, but in the north London slums of Kentish Town, not far from Brandt's Hampstead flat - the picture, for example, of a young girl in a back yard with her doll. She is looking up into the sky and waiting, perhaps, for a blackbird to peck off her nose. Brandt often stage-managed his photographs.

Surprisingly, it was not unusual for Brandt photographs to be put on one side by his editors (at Picture Post, say), and never published. His work didn't always fit into simple editorial patterns. There was often something uncomfortably obsessive. When a child sits in his pram in a Birmingham back yard, for instance, what do the dark shafts of shadow, almost threatening him, really mean?

All the same, to us, now, he captures a vanished world. The houses he photographed were knocked down, within 20 years, often in favour of high- rise blocks. Birmingham, a city always devoted to modernity, became a city of towers. But the diagnosis was wrong. The trouble with these houses, in either Birmingham or London, was too many people and too little money. (Hence Brandt's picture of a man and child having to share a bed in the same room.) The design of the buildings wasn't the problem.

It is notable how little equipment there is: a gas stove is about the limit. The few possessions are heavy and tough: solid prams (not buggies) and thick vests hanging on a line to dry above a coal fire. You hardly see a car. Children are everywhere, still able to play elaborate, Opie- like games in the middle of the street.

Like any teller of tales, Brandt was more interested in types than in individuals: a man washing the dirt off in a Birmingham sink evokes his celebrated portrayal of a miner scrubbing down after a day in the pit; a woman bending to clean the bath echoes his classic portraits of parlour- maids. His great achievement, confirmed in these long-neglected pictures, is that we now see the England of the Thirties and Forties through his eyes. Our England is Brandt's England.

Paul Barker

A view through to the rear of slum properties at Hockley, Birmingham, 1943

Housewife cleaning a staircase, Malden Rd, London NW5, 1943

Woman at her gas cooker, slum property, Hockley/ Ladywood, Birmingham, 1943

Man washing in the corner of a living-room, slum property, Hockley/Ladywood, Birmingham, 1943

Young man and girl in a back yard, Malden Rd, London NW5, 1943

Children playing in the street, Hockley,

Birmingham, 1943

Couple in their living-room, municipal estate, Kingstanding, Birmingham, 1939

Meal by an open window, municipal estate, Kingstanding, Birmingham, 1939