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| Artist Intro |
"Toppers and Cloth Caps " |
| Artist name / Photographer |
Bill Brandt
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"Toppers and Cloth Caps:
The Social Divide according to Bill Brandt"
The Special Photographers Gallery proudly presents a major exhibition examining Bill Brandt's social documentary images; together with a retrospective selection of his output from the 1930s onwards.
Due to the success of this exhibition, the Gallery's stock of Bill Brandt photographs is now limited - in some cases down to one print.
We have sold many of these fine photographs and are pleased to have offered many people the quite rare opportunity to purchase photographs that are authenticated to have been printed by Brandt himself.
To complement the exhibition "Toppers and Cloth Caps: The Social Divide according to Bill Brandt", The Special Photographers Gallery invited Francis Hodgson, the curator of the exhibition and a noted photographic writer, critic and historian to talk with the photographer Geraint Cunnick about his own personal interpretation of Brandt's images and his contribution to the history of photography and the social history of Britain.
Bill Brandt is by common consent the greatest British photographer. A visionary inventor, a magnificent poet of light and shade, a brilliant portraitist and photographer of landscape and nudes, he remained at heart the great journalist he had been at first. Profoundly moved as a young man by Brassaļ's Paris by Night, Brandt invented a way of seeing in which his hallmark tonalities of the night were never simply graphics but always richly full of meanings. Never a neutral witness, Brandt was a social commentator on a par with Dickens. He was a political photographer, a brave and serious reporter from the many fronts of the class war.
Brandt is too little respected in this country, and his pictures have been far too rarely seen since his death in 1983. The Special Photographers Company has assembled a selection of his social images and once again the genius of the man is visible in every one. Here they all are, the Eton boys in their tails and the coal-pickers in their misery. From the almost colonial splendour of commuter-belt cocktail parties to the grim back streets that Brandt so loved to haunt, the whole of his spectrum is on view. He was never much of a fan of the middle ground, much preferring to stuff a cloth cap in his pocket and pull on a topper to go from modest pub to Kensington parlour. Epsom was his kind of place, where he took an almost Runyanesque pleasure in the collision of high life and low. If there was something of John Betjeman in his make-up, a delight in the absurdities of privilege, there was also a large element of J.B. Priestly. He lived in Notting Hill himself, and would have loved the modern Notting Hill Gate, where the very rich rub shoulders with what remains of scruffy West London. It is absolutely right that the Special Photographers Company, a Notting Hill institution for many years, should be the one to have the desire to show these pictures.
The photographs are getting rare now, yet they still hold every ounce of their power. The exhibition is an occasion to purchase that rare thing, twenty-four carat classical photography that is wholly British. There is indeed no greater British photographer.
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