Bill Brandt, 1904-1983

Bequest of Eva Boros, Bill Brandt's first wife, to the present owner.

Royal Photographic Society 1981, reproduced as 'Child in Slum Housing, 1937', unpaginated.
See Brandt, B., 1966, for a similar subject reproduced plate 42c as 'A Sheffield Back Yard'.

'When I first met Bill Brandt, in 1936, his obsession was with documentary work. He was taking gloomy, often impressive, pictures of slums and slum-children.'  (Tom Hopkinson, 'Bill Brandt's Landscapes', Photography, vol.9, no. 4 (April 1954), pp.26-31, p. 26.)

This image does not appear in any of the books published by Brandt. However, it seems that it was exhibited at one of Brandt's very first exhibitions. A review in the New Statesman and Nation in 1940 is the only documented record of an exhibition of 'Modern Photography' that was held at Marx House, in London, in 1940. Bill Brandt was one of several London-based photographers who contributed. The reviewer described one of Brandt's images as 'an intolerable picture of a miner's child standing in a sunken yard where nothing but the upturned rim of an enamel basin holds the light'. There can be little doubt that the print offered here is of the same image.
The reviewer's use of the term 'intolerable' was a politicised statement, for, not unnaturally when faced with an exhibition held at Marx House, he believed that Brandt's work was intended as a critical commentary on the social conditions of the period. The reviewer called the work shown at the exhibition 'photography with a vengeance'.
As noted above, the image is reproduced in the catalogue to the retrospective exhibition of Brandt's photography held at the Royal Photographic Society in 1981, where it is identified as 'Child in Slum Housing' and dated '1937'. Brandt is known for frequently changing the titles to his photographs, and it is interesting that the title written on the back of this print is 'Coalminer's Child', a title which correlates with the description by the reviewer in the New Statesman. In addition, there is a hanging loop on the reverse of this print which, together with the unusually large format, suggests that it was intended as an exhibition print. It may be that this is the very print shown at Marx House in 1940.