5. Portraiture

Brandt was commissioned to take portraits throughout his life, and in his introduction to a book of these Alan Ross commented “The characteristics which Brandt later brought to his photographs of writers, actors and painters are equally apparent in his pictures of maids in mob caps waiting at table, cloth capped customers in an East End pub, a Northumbrian miner eating his supper with his head still black from the coal face”.

“What Brandt brought to bear in each case were the same things a poet brings to bear in the writing of a poem: a way of feeling one’s way intuitively into the subject, a sense of form and tact in not interfering with images which may seem to have appeared spontaneously”. However, the range of personalities that Brandt portrayed appears to be deliberately restricted, preferring to photograph those involved with creative activities, such as the painter Francis Bacon photographed in London in 1963.