As the Guardian obituary pointed out, it is a testament to the enduring power of his images that, on the centenary of his birth, Bill Brandt was lauded by the Victoria & Albert Museum as 'Britain's best-loved photographer of modern times'. That Brandt was actually born in Germany, and did not settle in Britain until 1931, aged 27, hardly seemed to matter. His photographs of a beleaguered Britain, during and after the Second World War, have made his the foremost social documentation of British life in the last century.
Brandt was a shy and secretive individual, uneasy with his German origins to such an extent that he reinvented himself as an Englishman, insisting until his death in 1983 that he had been born in south London rather than Hamburg. He had assisted Man Ray in 1929, and surrealism informed even his social reportage. An image such as 'Miners Returning into Daylight' from 1934 is startling not just for its depiction of working class hardship, but for its dark, subversive humour: eyes like white pinpricks stare out of sooty faces that call to mind blacked-up minstrels or theatrical demons as much as exhausted workers.
As an outsider posing as an Englishman, he was acutely attuned to the class distinctions that in the Thirties created a country made up of two distinct nations. A single year separates the image of dinner-suited and fur-draped couples captured in 'Cocktails in a Surrey Garden', 1935, and the stooped figure pushing a bike though a blackened landscape in 'Coal-searcher Going Home to Jarrow', 1936, but the subjects might as well inhabit different planets.