ABSTRACT
The exhibition of photography by the British photographer Bill Brandt, currently on view at the Museum of Modern Art, consists of 123 prints and covers a period of over three decades. It focuses on a wide variety of subjects and exhibits a wide range of attitudes toward the photographic medium itself. Mr. Brandt's portraits are also characterized by this same sense of malaise. The best of them—photographs of Robert Graves, Francis Bacon, Dylan Thomas, Malcolm Muggeridge, Edith and Osbert Sitwell, Ivy Compton-Burnett—show the figures and faces almost unbearably vulnerable. The strategy of Mr. Brandt's style seems to require something very like the exact opposite of this approach. The nature of his vision seems to place his subjects at a certain distance from the present. This sense of distance is untouched by nostalgia or regret. It is almost impersonal. It is a metaphor of fate.
