The English at Home by Bill Brandt

First published in 1936.

The introduction is touchingly anachronistic, out of touch with today’s social mores. It is a first person account by critic and essayist Raymond Mortimer, an Englishman coming home after some time abroad. He draws a parallel with Bill Brandt, who had an English father and German mother. Brandt was born in Germany and grew up outside England in Switzerland and Paris, where here worked with surrealist photographer Man Ray. Mortimer affirms Brandt's place in the canon of great photographers, while positioning the artist as anthropologist. This idea is reinforced in an essay by Yumiko Fukunishi, "...he was able to present the British social problem objectively and sometimes artistically, without any of the dilemmas which some English-born photographers such as Humphrey Spender had to face...Brandt was a ʻthreshold figureʼ [...]because unlike Spender, who was from the English upper middle-class, he was a foreigner." ...more