Bill Brandt, Brassai, and Irving Penn at Marlborough Gallery
Two very different exhibitions within five minutes of each other in central London posed questions about aesthetic ethics in the past and present. I’ll review them separately because with the inclusion of the photos, they will be too long for one blog post.
At the Marlborough, Through A Modern Lens showcased black and white photography from three 20C masters of chiaroscuro and narrative suggestion, Bill Brandt, Irving Penn, and Brassai.
Brassai slyly shows us how grotesque the idle rich can appear in an image of a wealthy middle-aged woman plastered in make-up in a Paris bar. She can barely shove those rings on her stubby fingers, and her wrists and fingers are draped with pearls, but since public display of her riches is the essence of her self esteem, she will keep doing so. Her expression suggests that she suspects that Brassai’s attention is not entirely admiring.
By contrast, Brassai reveals the poverty of those Parisians in menial work, such as this dean of porters:
Brassai’s astute observation is not limited to the social: the chasm between rich and poor is not the only gaping hole in people’s lives. In a click of his camera, he captures the abyss that can grow in a relationship:
Bill Brandt’s crisp, seductive images draw the viewer into the life of others. His depictions of the working classes say so much about appalling poverty and privileged entitlement. A mother’s hand holds a toddler in ragged clothes with dirt smeared on his cherubic face while his sister, squeezed into a coat she’s outgrown, stands beside them.
Elsewhere, in a grand house, maids stand expressionless, aware that they are forbidden from chatting or even smiling to each other in front of their ‘masters’.
In another image, a maid not only runs a bath for her indolent employer, but tests the temperature of the water, probably because she would get into trouble if the lady of the house had to so much as turn a tap.
Brandt also drew attention to the plight of civilians in WW2, swaddled in thick layers deep in bunkers:
However, Brandt’s observation of the working classes can drift into exploitative voyeurism. When he snaps a brassy looking middle-aged barmaid, one senses his horrified fascination.
Similarly, when he shows us a half-dressed middle-age man dragging on a cigarette in a dank, dimly lit room, there is a suggestion - just an almost imperceptible hint- that perhaps he could have pulled himself out of poverty if he had made a bit more of an effort. This subtle questioning ignores all that we know about human nature through psychology and sociology, namely, that those with nothing have nothing to lose, and that their chances of gainful employment are next to zero when they can’t afford to buy smart clothes.
Much has been written about the male gaze, and this is also apparent in Brandt’s undeniably sensuous but also objectifying photos of women’s bodies. The woman herself, her identity, her personality, is so unimportant that her face is often not even shown.
Of course they are bewitching images, but the fact that few photographers were doing the same to male bodies at the time, and those that were, like Robert Mapplethorpe were often seen as transgressive (or were gay) suggests that heterosexual women lingering on the beauty of parts of the male body would not have been appreciated or accepted. For me, the unexpected views of the less overtly sexual images are more enthralling, accentuating the mystery of life and our place in the natural world:
The objectification of Black people by white artists has also been analysed over the past few decades, and Irving Penn’s images of Blacks present them either as exotic and tribal, or as sexual unknown pleasures.
Penn also presents us with elegant fashion shots. Many of these are taken from the back, so the identity of the female model is obscured, as it is for Brandt’s nudes:
But we can’t judge the past by today’s moral standards. The best of these images reveal how much a picture can tell us, and transport us, through space and time, to another world.