Clemency Burtonhill

A man of many names and faces

issue 10 April 2004

If you’ll excuse the pun, Paul Delany’s biography of the man commonly dubbed ‘the greatest British photographer’ brings one thing sharply into focus. For Bill Brandt was not, as it happens, British at all, but was born in 1904 to German parents of Russian extraction — a fact he denied vehemently all his adult life. This rather fundamental inconvenience raises all manner of questions about psychological identity and the ethics and artifice of self-image-making. It also forces us to re-open the century-old can of worms as to whether an artist’s work can be more profitably understood by having some knowledge of their private life.

The definitive word on this issue came in 1919 from Brandt’s contemporary T. S. Eliot, who announced that ‘the progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality’.

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