Bill Brandt’s Negative Beginnings

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Young people sometimes look at the world with brash certainty, seeing only absolutes â€" stark blacks and bright whites. But time and experience teach us that life exists mostly in nuanced gray, and that ambiguity often provides insight.

For the photographer Bill Brandt, the reverse was true. His early social documentary work was rendered almost entirely in subtle midtones. It was only in his later, and more famous, nudes and landscapes that he made strikingly high-contrast prints.

To really understand Mr. Brandt’s work, you have to turn to the original, vintage prints, and that’s exactly the goal of “Shadow and Light,” a retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art. His photos were exhibited at MoMA in 1948 and again in 1961, but it was the 1969 exhibition curated by John Szarkowski that cemented his reputation as one of the most important 20th-century photographers. Until recently, the museum’s Brandt collection was composed almost entirely of high-contrast prints made for the 1969 exhibition under the supervision of the photographer.

After he began making his dramatic prints in the early 1950s, Mr. Brandt would only reprint his photos from before and during World War II in much higher contrast, which radically changed their effects. But a recent acquisitions campaign by MoMA focused on prints Mr. Brandt himself had made at or around the time the negatives were exposed.

Bill Brandt/Bill Brandt Archive Ltd., courtesy of MoMA “Reg Butler.” Circa 1952.

Exhibiting these images allowed the curator, Sarah Hermanson Meister, to connect what had seemed like completely separate silos of Mr. Brandt’s work.

“If you’re forced to look at the different sections of his work in isolation, it’s difficult to understand the trajectory of a career,” she said.

The exhibition fleshes out Mr. Brandt’s work with many images that are rarely shown, including photos from World War II that go beyond the images of daily life in London bomb shelters that were always included in previous retrospectives. Without the added context, it is easy to dismiss his early social documentary and portrait work as a prelude to his more influential work from the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s. In reality, he would have been an important photographer even if he had stopped photographing before his nudes.

Bill Brandt/Bill Brandt Archive Ltd., courtesy of MoMA “Gull’s Nest, Late on Midsummer Night, Isle of Skye.” 1947.

The volume of images in the exhibition and the accompanying book provides an opportunity to understand the development of Mr. Brandt’s vision and his printing.

“Looking at the vintage prints, you begin to see a shift from the late ’40s into the mid-’50s from very silvery tones, which even persist after the war, into the higher contrast, higher pitch of the work in the portrait of Reg Butler (above) and the portrait of a young girl lying on the floor in that interior (below),” Ms. Meister said.

By examining the prints closely, viewers can also see that nothing was off-limits for Mr. Brandt when it came to darkroom work. He would print something one way and then print it in a totally different way, recrop it and often extensively retouch. He would use a straight razor to cut, scrape and press the emulsion, a fine brush to apply ink or watercolor washes, or a graphite pencil to add or strengthen detail.

“While he could be remarkably uninhibited in his image revisions, at times he demonstrated a restraint and a lightness of touch that is almost invisible on his finished prints,” Lee Ann Daffner, a MoMA conservator, wrote in the book.

Later in his life, Mr. Brandt might have taken an existing print and rephotographed, reprinted and retouched it to attain the desired effect.

He certainly wasn’t the only photographer to retouch images extensively or to mine different sections of the gray scale. But the wildly different printing approaches he took during his career made his work difficult to understand fully.

The MOMA exhibit, which runs through Aug. 12, is a tribute not only to the breadth of his work, but also to the primacy of the print â€" the physical object â€" in truly comprehending photographic artists.

“In the past, discussion of the dramatic evolution of Brandt’s printing style has been relegated to the sidelines, and while it is necessary to value the nearly impenetrable darkness and muted tones 
of his early prints from the 1930s, it is not so simple to dismiss the forcefulness of his later interpretations as an aging man’s bastard prints,” Ms. Meister wrote in the book’s introduction. “Indeed, a significant part of Brandt’s art is that the exposure of the negative was, for him, only the beginning. In many respects, each Brandt print is unique because the pervasiveness of his hand in retouching his work â€" to correct and to enhance, with a variety of tools â€" means that it is rare to find two prints presented in an identical manner.”

Bill Brandt/Bill Brandt Archive Ltd., courtesy of MoMA “Portrait of a Young Girl, Eaton Place.” 1955.

“Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light” is on view at the Museum of Modern Art through Aug. 12.

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