2. The English at Home Brandt married Eva in 1932 and moved to London. His father was in fact a British national and I think its true to say that Brandt had never really felt at home in Germany. Certainly there were aspects of English society that captured his imagination and between 1931 and 1935 he produced the work that would become The English at Home, published by Batsford at 5/- in 1936.
This sets out to offer a social critique of pre-war England; it succeeds not only in those terms but also as an artistic triumph for a young man barely turned thirty. In the introduction Raymond Mortimer says ‘Whatever rank you may think photography takes as an art, Mr Brandt has the eyes and temperament of an artist. He has an artist’s faculty for being surprised and excited by things other people would not notice, the artist’s ability to select the significant, the artist’s understanding of the medium in which he is working’. ‘Mr Brandt shows himself to be not only an artist but an anthropologist. He seems to have wandered about England with the detached curiosity of a man investigating the customs of some remote and unfamiliar tribe'.
The book was a flop and John Szarkowski has touched upon a possible reason: ‘Brandt’s work has been consistently separate from the photographic consensus of the moment: reflective when it should have been militant, romantic when it should have been skeptical, experimental when it should have been factual’.  |
