Bill Brandt: A Life.

BILL BRANDT: A LIFE

BY PAUL DELANY

STANFORD: STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2004. 366PP./ $47.50

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Coinciding with the 100th anniversary of the photographer's birth, this 336-page-long book is the first biography of such a scope on Bill Brandt, a man who might be considered as the most important and influential British photographer of his generation. Brandt was born in 1904 and died in 1984). Paul Delany is a British born professor of English who retired a few years ago from the Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. Among other works he has written a biography of D.H. Lawrence. This latter information can help the reader give context to the role and space that Brandt's alleged sexual fantasies and relationships take in this biography.

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The author structured this biography in 30 chapters of roughly ten pages each. Each of these chapters has been designed and written as a specific entity following a ritual combining chronological and thematic approaches. As a result of this strategy, most of the chapter/episodes of Brandt's life can almost be read independently from the preceding one, which bestows a sense of flexibility as well as a feeling of discontinuity on the whole book. Mr. Delany is neither a photography aficionado nor someone who always took the time to check some of the terms more specifically related to the field that he uses--as an example the reader may encounter such phrases as "a deep-focus" lens--but on the whole it can be said that he did a thorough research regarding the details and "crustiness" of his facts, facts from which he sometimes extrapolates possibilities and suppositions. This latter writing style, which may not be the rule for all biographies, is mainly at play in the first chapters of the book, and can become a turn-off for some readers. It certainly gives more "color" to Brandt's black and white world of rather secretive isolation. There is one fact that Delany clearly establishes: the photographer was born in Hamburg on May 2, 1904, at 11:30 a.m., a fact that had been greatly obscured by Brandt, himself a British citizen by birth, who did not seem to enjoy being reminded of the geography of his birth, and worked all his life at confusing his biographers. Delany never met Brandt and as a result managed to stay away from the photographer's self-constructed identity; unfortunately the author sometimes elaborates in a far-fetched way on the considerable collection of facts he assembled, which makes his book more entertaining for the general reader but also less reliable at times.

Delany gives the reader a large amount of peripheral information that accounts for part of the volume of this volume. The number and variety of full-page illustrations, a minimum of four per chapter, make this imposing work a little more visual than most biographies. Nevertheless, Brandt's work is only superficially scratched (and the images chosen to illustrate the dust jacket my be be a good illustration of this point). More space could have been dedicated to a detailed analysis of Brandt's photography, an area where hypotheses would have been welcome, and where useful knowledge, for the readers' sake, could have been provided. Fortunately, this may not be the definitive book on Bill Brandt.