Page 47 - Studio International - July August 1975

Style and Ideology in British Art and

Photography, 1900-1940

Ian Jeffrey and David Mellor

The connections in Britain between photography and the traditional visual arts
during this century have been close. Photography and painting are integral parts
of the same visual culture and express a shared content. There are many points of
interaction, of borrowing and influence: the photographs of Bill Brandt and
Humphrey Spender from the 'thirties and 'forties may have been partly determined by
the example of the scenography of de Chirico; paintings by Edward Burra in the
'thirties reflect his interest in the commodity naturalism of such commercial
photographers as John Havinden and Sougez, and in the low-life settings of Brassai.
At another level of stylistic affinity, both photographers and painters drew on such a
source as the German style of the New Objectivity, but despite these points of contact
and similarity arising from shared sources the histories of photography and a
traditional art such as painting are radically different. Different, that is, if they are
treated as separate but comparable categories, a major and a minor art evolving in
their own self-referential sequences. But once located in their shared historical
setting they re-emerge as expressions of a common content, as symptomatic of the
preoccupations of the collective imagination.

(Above) Malcolm Arbuthnot
Sunset at Limehouse 1908
Photograph
(Left) Humphrey Spender
Bolton Street Scene c. 1937
Observation Archive, University of Sussex

Any continuous, independent history several friends, including Martin making were probably determined by an
of photography immediately highlights Harvey. I thought perhaps he would be effort to be different, or sufficiently so to
the problem of an apparently haphazard annoyed, but he thought it was "great associate himself with the vanguard
mutation of style and subject matter fun" '.2 Arbuthnot became a successful groups in photography. Around 1905
when considered against the steadier portrait photographer in Bond Street, a and during the 'nineties the photo-world
tradition-conscious evolution of painting. yachtsman and a motor tourist, had been particularly schismatic and had
An immediate example of this is the associating with the art vanguard as a re-created at a provincial and amateur
movement towards urban photography `sporty' option, as a form of 'modern' level a hierarchic and a secessionist
in the period around 1905, when Walter behaviour. He was the initiator in taking structure which mirrored that of the
Benington and Malcolm Arbuthnot Roger Fry's post-impressionist world of painting. Arbuthnot entered
pictured industry and the city in a manner exhibition of 1912 to Liverpool and this structure at a time when it was
which anticipated the industrial lectured on modern art with Roger Fry becoming ossified and, more importantly,
landscape paintings of Charles Holmes and Frank Rutter, its leading advocates at a time when the expanding illustrated
in the 'twenties' and also make them in Britain. press offered alternative activity and
forerunners of the vorticist concern Arbuthnot is representative of the payment; he worked for The Graphic
with modern forces. Arbuthnot was fashionable interest in modern art, which and The London Magazine, and this
even a signatory to the vorticist manifesto marked itself out as stylish and daring. prepared the way for his career as a
Blast and easily looks like a self- His photographs, with their schematic portrait photographer. Lacking the
conscious programmatic modernist. But flat shapes and city subjects, were novel institutional underpinning and the
their city pictures are no more than an in the context of the British photographic professional tradition of painting,
isolated phenomenon and Arbuthnot's world, and this is probably how they were photographers such as Arbuthnot were
vanguard position virtually an accident; intended by Arbuthnot, as recognizably under less pressure to conform; as
he was an innocent party in a project of different to the soft-focus rural subjects amateurs and members of the poorer
Wyndham Lewis and in an unpublished which were characteristic of the middle class they were under more
memoir admitted: 'I was rather photographic establishment. His pressure to look out for themselves and
perturbed to find that I had "blasted" experiments with new types of picture forced to adapt their careers to
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