Page 52 - Studio International - July August 1975

into pictorial and traditional modes. mode in photography only to develop Hielscher. The common basis is a
But photography worked in a different another established by German photo- cultural pessimism working itself into
social space to painting: lacking an reporters in the late 'twenties, the form through compensatory visions of the
academy and a tradition it depended on revelatory documentarist manner which past and of man's inseparable unity with
the illustrated press for an audience. meshed naturally with the rhetoric of the Nature, and at another level in imagery
During the 'thirties this area became a documentary film movement in Britain. from the underworld.
particular province in the documentary Dr Erich Salomon was its most Burra's painting constitutes something
movement and set a high value on conspicuous representative and his radically new in British art. He had
objective reporting for a mass audience. achievement was signalled in 1931 with created a new pictorial vocabulary drawn
In his foreword to The Street Markets the publication of Berühmte from the enclosed underworld of the big
of London in 1936 Moholy-Nagy Zeitgenossen in unbewachten Augenblicken. cities and drawn on novel sources, on
expressed this tendency: 'I am convinced In over too candid photographs of photography and the cinema. Discussing
that the days of the merely "beautiful" European statesmen and notables Burra's painting The Café of 1932, Paul
photograph are numbered and that we Salomon emphasized their humanity, Nash suggested that 'his extraordinary
shall be increasingly interested in pomposity and fallibility. This fantasies . . . owe something to his keen
providing a truthful record of deflationary critical impulse shaded into appreciation of photography . . . of
objectively determined fact'. The satire on the one hand and straight photographic foreshortening and other
documentary style was a constraint on exposure of social misery on the other. dramas of perspective'. Nash saw the
pictorial and surrealist impulses in The strength of the documentary style influence of photography in Burra's
photography. in Britain, its option for the `intense concentration on highlights . . .
The interactions of a realist programme straightforward scenarios of everyday insistence upon isolated objects . . .
and a surrealist sensibility can be seen life, curtailed the growth of a schematic bottles, baskets and napkins' ; " and his
most clearly in the photographs of Bill critical rhetoric in British photography: painting Rossi, of 1930, appears as a
Brandt during the 'thirties. Brandt there are no British equivalents to parody version of the commodity goods
injected drama and atmosphere into Brassai or Dorothea Lange with their that were familiar in the photography
scrupulously realistic photographs, taste for sharp contrasts of squalor and of Sougez and John Havinden. That is
investing realist material with a surrealist affluence. Instead the critical thrust to say, Burra focused on exactly that part
rhetoric of strangeness, uncanny ghostly implied in documentary photography of modernist style, the commodity
lighting tones and haunting Chirico- was provided in lay-out with the naturalism which was the commercial
esque perspectives : 'for a minute or two juxtaposition of pictures in an
this street in Bayswater had something oppositional arrangement; it appears in
of the dream-like atmosphere of an the contrasting of photographs in Paul
Italian piazza in a Chirico painting. Cohen-Portheim's The Spirit of London
There was all the nostalgia of an autumn in 1935, in the pairing of pictures in
afternoon and there was my picture'. Lilliput and survived into the 'forties in
Brandt wrote about his photography in Camera in London where Shoreditch
the introduction to Camera in London in backyards face Adelphi rooftops.
1948 and returned constantly to the The city emerged in the 'thirties as a
question of the public role of the place of mystery and jarring social
photographer as mediator: 'Vicariously, extremes discovered by the photographer
through another person's eyes, men and as anunderground man,a passive observer
women can see the world anew. It is shown in the crowds. In the introduction to
to them as interesting and exciting. There The Spirit of London Raymond Mortimer
is given to them again a sense of wonder'. presented the photographer-writer
In the documentary discourse situation Cohen-Portheim as a secret observer:
the photographer became a reporter and, `And there would always be a fag
if an artist, a clandestine artist. The hanging down from his lip as he sloped
reaction to modernist photography was along with the crowd. There was often
sharp, interpreted with repugnance in also a camera in his pocket . . .' The
these terms by Bill Brandt : 'The observer was both a recorder of social
photograph of the unknown — such misery and a connoisseur of the
photographs as those taken with a underworld; photo-reporting was Kurt Hielscher
microscopic attachment of lowly forms inflected in Britain towards passive Illustration No. 304 from
of life or such as a close-up of the heart discovering rather than active criticism Deutschland Baukunst und Landschaft 1924
of a cabbage — seldom arouses in the and relates closely to Christopher
spectator any emotion beyond Isherwood's placing of his British
bewilderment or curiosity or perhaps observer, in Goodbye to Berlin, as a
a logical attraction or repulsion'." camera-eye drifting unaffected through
Photographers rejected one German the extremes of social experience.
Edward Burra is the principal example
of this spirit in painting with his elegiac
enhancement of café and nightclub
society in the late 'twenties and early
'thirties .The connection between his
favoured iconography and that of George
Grosz and Fritz Lang in the early
'twenties is suggestive; he revived the
imagery of a criminal lecherous
underworld which had obsessed both
Grosz and Lang and which had
coexisted in Germany in the early 'twenties
with a melodramatic romantic taste for
Nature. During the 'thirties there is just
such a conjunction of imagery from
nature and from the urban underworld :
in Britain, Burra and Graham Sutherland
occupied the same sort of positions which
Bill Brandt had been held earlier in Germany by Edward Burra
The Sun on Hampstead 1938 George Grosz and a representative of the The Café 1932
Photograph nature cult like the photographer Watercolour' 30 x 25 in.
32