Prof. Boerner's Explorations

by Gerald Boerner  

Note:
The set of quotes that were originally included in this posting and the images (small, low-resolution JPEGs) have been removed at the request of the Bill Brandt Archive Ltd, London, UK. You may check out the Masters of Photography site under “Brandt” to see some of his images. The quotes are available from the PhotoQuote web site. [See references at the end of this posting.]

Bill Brandt (1904 – 1983)

Bill Brandt was an influential British photographer and photojournalist known for his high-contrast images of British society and his distorted nudes and landscapes.

Bill Brandt was one of the acknowledged masters of 20th century photography. Taken as a whole, his work constitutes one of the most varied and vivid social documents of Great Britain, producing a body of photographic works that range from stark realism and social comment to pure abstraction and surrealism.

Brandt was born in 1904 in Hamburg to German parents of Russian descent. His childhood years were spent mostly in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany and also in Davos, Switzerland. When Ezra Pound visited the Schwarzwald residence, Brandt made his portrait. In appreciation, Pound allegedly offered Brandt an introduction to Man Ray, in whose Paris studio. In 1929 Brandt went to Paris and worked for approximately 3 months in Man Ray’s studio where he also learned much from the Parisian art of the period, such as the films of Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali and the photographs of Eugene Atget, and Andre Kertesz.

In 1933 Brandt moved to London and began documenting all levels of British society. His ambition was to become an independent professional photographer. His first book, The English at Home, appeared in 1936. Based on the portrayal of types and stereotypes, this was a kind of manifesto of British society, through which Brandt undertook to show the British their real faces. The complete opposite of the ideal motherland of his dreams, he discovered a divided people, a stratified society with a well-defined caste system, in the grip of economic crisis. Two years later he published A Night in London; in the same way as his friend Brassaï, Brandt enjoyed the uncertain, magical lighting effects of the night. Prowling around almost invisibly, he recorded London, revealing social inequality. He did not hesitate to ask his close friends to pose for him for certain situations.

His career through the 1930s and 1940s ran parallel with the emergence of the great photographic magazines such as Picture Post and Lilliput which afforded Brandt the opportunity to produce important, ground-breaking photographic essays, the most notable being images from the Industrial and Coal-mining areas of Northern England. He was a regular contributor to magazines such as Lilliput, Picture Post, and Harper’s Bazaar. He documented the Underground bomb shelters of London during The Blitz in 1940, commissioned by the Ministry of Information. During World War II, Brandt focused every kind of subject – as can be seen in his "Camera in London" (1948) but excelled in portraiture and landscape.

Brandt contrived, in his portrait of E.M. Forster (1947), something of the shadowed luxuriance of calotype and later wrote of his intentions in Camera in London (1948):

When photographing a writer, I was forcibly impressed by the Victorian character of the room in which he sat. A hard print brought out this impression. Details were lost as they were in early Victorian photographs. My print did not imitate those old photographs; the methods of printing simply formed a link of association between the two, adding its reminiscent effect to the Victorian setting.

With the end of the war, Brandt’s attention turned away from reportage, to the landscape and its natural form in the book "Literary Britain" 1951. He is also known for his series of extraordinary female nudes, particularly distinguished by his use of a wide-angle lens in close-up (causing the body shapes to appear distorted) and by the stark black -and white tones with little middle range.

His first nudes were photographed with an old wooden plate camera which the police had formerly used, lacking a shutter and equipped with a wide-angle lens. These photos seemed inspired by Balthus, Hitchcock, and Orson Wells. Their dramatic atmosphere is enhanced by the unusual viewpoints of the architectural backgrounds, imbuing them with a menacing atmosphere of murder or suffocation, perhaps connected with the asthma from which Brandt suffered all his life.

These unnatural perspectives, which shocked people at the time, based on the enlargement of volumes and close-up treatment of details, may be compared with the experiments of Picasso, the forms of Henry Moore, and, of course, the distorted work of Andre Kertész. Increasingly turning to abstract photography, from 1951 to 1960, when he gave up nude work, Brandt undertook exterior views (on the beaches of East Sussex, Normandy, and the south of France), in which he brought together the eternal themes of women and the sea, birthplace and symbol of creation.

His major books from the post-war period are Literary Britain (1951), and Perspective of Nudes (1961), followed by a compilation of the best of all areas of his work, Shadow of Light (1966). Brandt became Britain’s most influential and internationally admired photographer of the 20th century. Many of his works have important social commentary but also poetic resonance. His landscapes and nudes are dynamic, intense and powerful, often using wide-angle lenses and distortion.

In the context of the art of his time, whose aesthetic experiments are reflected in his work, Bill Brandt was one of the first photographers to have created an individual style. While allowing the vocabulary of his art to evolve, he consciously worked at creating a personal photographic language. Based on the alliance between form and content, the fruit of experiment, exploration of the imaginary and an ever deeper investigation of the same themes, his work is notable for its splendid use of strong contrasts and densely printed images.

Bill Brandt is widely considered to be one of the most important British photographers of the 20th century. In 1981 The Royal Photographic Society inaugurated its National Centre of Photography in Bath with an exhibition of 50 years of Brandt’s pictures. His work has also been honored by a score of smaller shows. in such far-flung cities as Paris, Stockholm, San Francisco, Houston, Boston, and Washington, D.C. Brandt’s pictures are considered important by London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, New York’s MoMA, Rochester’s International Museum of Photography, and Paris’ Bibliotheque Nationale, which all have major collections of his prints.

Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Bill Brandt that can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Brandt

Also see…

Masters of Photography: Bill Brandt…
http://www.masters-of-photography.com/B/brandt/brandt.html

Quotations by Bill Brandt on the PhotoQuote web site…
http://www.photoquotes.com/ShowQuotes.aspx?id=259&name=Brandt,Bill

Michael Hoppen Gallery on Bill Brandt…
http://tr.im/Gl0r

by Gerald Boerner

“Never, never, never give up.” 
— Winston Churchill

“It is never too late to give up our prejudices.” 
— Henry David Thoreau

“If you think education is expensive, try ignorance.” 
— Author Unknown

“Prejudice is the child of ignorance.” 
— William Hazlitt

“Act as if what you do makes a difference.  It does.” 
— William James

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better.  It’s not.” 
— Dr. Seuss

“Dare to reach out your hand into the darkness, to pull another hand into the light.” 
— Norman B. Rice

“Every action in our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.” 
— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“AIDS obliges people to think of sex as having, possibly, the direst consequences:  suicide.  Or murder.” 
— Susan Sontag

“We cannot live only for ourselves.  A thousand fibers connect us with our fellow men.” 
— Herman Melville

“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” 
— Anne Frank

“It is bad enough that people are dying of AIDS, but no one should die of ignorance.”
— Elizabeth Taylor

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope… and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.” 
— Robert F. Kennedy

“Ignorance and prejudice are fuelling the spread of a preventable disease.  World AIDS Day, 1 December is an opportunity for people worldwide to unite in the fight against HIV and AIDS….[I]t’s up to you, me and us to stop the spread of HIV and end prejudice.” 
— worldaidsday.org, 2006

“Started in 1988, World AIDS Day is not just about raising money, but also about increasing awareness, fighting prejudice and improving education.  World AIDS Day is important in reminding people that HIV has not gone away, and that there are many things still to be done.” 
— avert.org, 2006

World AIDS Day: December 1st

World AIDS Day, observed December 1 each year, is dedicated to raising awareness of the AIDS pandemic caused by the spread of HIV infection. It is common to hold memorials to honor persons who have died from HIV/AIDS on this day. Government and health officials also observe the event, often with speeches or forums on the AIDS topics. Since 1995, the President of the United States has made an official proclamation on World AIDS Day. Governments of other nations have followed suit and issued similar announcements.

AIDS has killed more than 25 million people between 1981 and 2007, and an estimated 33.2 million people worldwide live with HIV as of 2007, making it one of the most destructive epidemics in recorded history. Despite recent, improved access to antiretroviral treatment and care in many regions of the world, the AIDS epidemic claimed an estimated 2 million lives in 2007, of which about 270,000 were children.

History

World AIDS Day was first conceived in August 1987 by James W. Bunn and Thomas Netter, two public information officers for the Global Programme on AIDS at the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. Bunn and Netter took their idea to Dr. Jonathan Mann, Director of the Global Programme on AIDS (now known as UNAIDS). Dr. Mann liked the concept, approved it, and agreed with the recommendation that the first observance of World AIDS Day should be 1 December, 1988.

Bunn suggested the date of December 1st to ensure coverage by western news media, something he believed was vital to the success of World AIDS Day. He felt that because 1988 was an election year in the U.S. media outlets would be weary of their post-election coverage and eager to find a fresh story to cover. Bunn and Netter felt that December 1 was long enough after the election and soon enough before the Christmas holidays that it was, in effect, a dead spot in the news calendar and thus perfect timing for World AIDS Day.

Bunn, originally a reporter covering the epidemic for KPIX-TV in San Francisco, along with producer Nancy Saslow, also conceived and initiated “AIDS Lifeline” – a public awareness and health education campaign that was syndicated to television stations in the U.S. “AIDS Lifeline” was honored with a Peabody Award, a local Emmy, and the first National Emmy ever awarded to a local station in the U.S.

On 18 June, 1986 the “AIDS Lifeline” project was honored with a Presidential Citation for Private Sector Initiatives, presented by President Ronald Reagan. Bunn was then asked by Dr. Mann, on behalf of the U.S. government, to take a two-year leave-of-absence from his reporting duties to join Dr. Mann (an epidemiologist for the Centers for Disease Control) and assist in the creation of the Global Programme on AIDS. Mr. Bunn accepted and was named the first Public Information Officer for the Global Programme on AIDS. Along with Mr. Netter he created, designed, and implemented the inaugural World AIDS Day observance – now the longest-running disease awareness and prevention initiative of its kind in the history of public health.

The Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS (UNAIDS) became operational in 1996, and it took over the planning and promotion of World AIDS Day. Rather than focus on a single day, UNAIDS created the World AIDS Campaign in 1997 to focus on year-round communications, prevention and education.

In its first two years, the theme of World AIDS Day focused on children and young people. These themes were strongly criticized at the time for ignoring the fact that people of all ages may become infected with HIV and suffer from AIDS. But the themes drew attention to the HIV/AIDS epidemic, helped alleviate some of the stigma surrounding the disease, and helped boost recognition of the problem as a family disease.

In 2004, the World AIDS Campaign became an independent organization.

Each year, Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI have released a greeting message for patients and doctors on World AIDS Day.

Choosing the theme

From its inception until 2004, UNAIDS spearheaded the World AIDS Day campaign, choosing annual themes in consultation with other global health organizations.

A large red ribbon hangs between
columns in the north portico of
the White House for
World AIDS Day,
November 30, 2007

As of 2008, each year’s World AIDS Day theme is chosen by the World AIDS Campaign’s Global Steering Committee after extensive consultation with people, organizations and government agencies involved in the prevention and treatment of HIV/AIDS. For each World AIDS Day from 2005 through 2010, the theme will be “Stop AIDS. Keep the Promise.”, with a yearly sub-theme. This overarching theme is designed to encourage political leaders to keep their commitment to achieve universal access to HIV/AIDS prevention, treatment, care, and support by the year 2010.

This theme is not specific to World AIDS Day, but is used year-round in WAC’s efforts to highlight HIV/AIDS awareness within the context of other major global events including the G8 Summit. World AIDS Campaign also conducts “in-country” campaigns throughout the world, like the Student Stop AIDS Campaign, an infection-awareness campaign targeting young people throughout the UK.

Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:

World AIDS Day that can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_Aids_Day

by Gerald Boerner

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”
— Abraham Lincoln

“Am I not destroying my enemies when I make friends of them?”
— Abraham Lincoln

“America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves.”
— Abraham Lincoln

“As I would not be a slave, so I would not be a master. This expresses my idea of democracy.”
— Abraham Lincoln

“Better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak out and remove all doubt.”
— Abraham Lincoln

“Character is like a tree and reputation like a shadow. The shadow is what we think of it; the tree is the real thing.”
— Abraham Lincoln

“Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such a purpose – and you allow him to make war at pleasure.”
— Abraham Lincoln

“Any people anywhere, being inclined and having the power, have the right to rise up, and shake off the existing government, and form a new one that suits them better. This is a most valuable – a most sacred right – a right, which we hope and believe, is to liberate the world.”
— Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln: The Last Best Hope of Earth

Abraham Lincoln’s position on freeing the slaves was one of the central issues in American history. Initially, Lincoln expected to bring about the eventual extinction of slavery by stopping its further expansion into any U.S. territory, and by offering compensated emancipation (an offer accepted only by Washington, D.C). Lincoln stood by the Republican Party platform in 1860, which stated that slavery should not be allowed to expand into any more territories. Most Americans agreed that if all future states admitted to the Union were to be free states, that slavery would eventually be abolished.

In 1842, Lincoln married Mary Todd, daughter of a prominent slave-owning family from Kentucky. His brother-in-law, Ben Hardin Helm would later serve as a Brig. General in the Confederacy, leading the 1st Kentucky Cavalry of the Orphan Brigade. Lincoln returned to the political stage as a result of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act and soon became a leading opponent of the Slave Power–that is the political power of the southern slave owners. The 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, written to form the territories of Kansas and Nebraska, included language, designed by Stephen A. Douglas, which allowed the settlers to decide whether they would or would not accept slavery in their region. Lincoln saw this as a repeal of the 1820 Missouri Compromise which had outlawed slavery above the 36-30′ parallel.

On December 1, 1862, in his annual message to Congress, Lincoln reminded his fellow citizens of the stakes of winning the Civil War:

“The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present. The occasion is piled high with difficulty, and we must rise with the occasion. As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew. We must disenthrall our selves, and then we shall save our country.

“Fellow citizens, we cannot escape history. We of this Congress and this administration will be remembered in spite of ourselves. No personal significance, or insignificance, can spare one or another of us. The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor, to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union. The world knows we do know how to save it. We—even we here—hold the power, and bear the responsibility. In giving freedom to the slave, we assure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth. Other means may succeed; this could not fail. The way is plain, peaceful, generous, just—a way which, if followed, the world will forever applaud, and God must forever bless.”

Many of Lincoln’s anti-slavery sentiments were shown in the seven Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858 between Lincoln and Stephen Douglas, his opponent who defeated him in the Senate race. Douglas criticized him as being inconsistent, saying he altered his message and position on slavery and on the political rights of freed blacks in order to appeal to the audience before him, as northern Illinois was more hostile to slavery than southern Illinois.

Lincoln wrote to Joshua Speed in 1855:

How can any one who abhors the oppression of negroes, be in favor of degrading classes of white people? Our progress in degeneracy appears to me to be pretty rapid. As a nation, we began by declaring that “all men are created equal.” We now practically read it “all men are created equal, except negroes.” When the Know-Nothings get control, it will read “all men are created equal, except negroes, and foreigners, and catholics.” When it comes to this I should prefer emigrating to some country where they make no pretence of loving liberty — to Russia, for instance, where despotism can be take pure, and without the base alloy of hypocracy [sic].

The Republican Party was committed to restricting the growth of slavery, and its victory in the election of 1860 was the trigger for secession acts by Southern states. The debate before 1860 was mainly focused on the Western territories, especially Kansas and the popular sovereignty controversy.

Though he thought it was essentially a reaffirmation of terms already in the Constitution, Lincoln was a driving force in 1861 for the compromise Corwin amendment. It was passed by Congress and two states, but was abandoned once the Civil War began. It would have explicitly prohibited congressional interference with slavery in states where it already existed. The Corwin amendment was a late attempt at reconciliation, but it also was a measure of reassurance to the slave-holding border states that the federal government was not intent on taking away their powers.

At the beginning of the war, Lincoln prohibited his generals from freeing slaves even in captured territories. On August 30, 1861, Major General John C. Frémont, the commander of the Union Army in St. Louis, proclaimed that all slaves owned by Confederates in Missouri were free. Lincoln opposed allowing military leaders take executive actions that were not authorized by the government, and realized that such actions could induce slaveowners in border states to oppose the Union or even start supporting the enemy. Lincoln demanded Frémont modify his order and free only slaves owned by Missourians actively working for the South. When Frémont refused, he was replaced by the conservative General Henry Wager Halleck.

Lincoln made it clear that the North was fighting the war to preserve the Union. On August 22, 1862, just a few weeks before signing the Proclamation and after he had already discussed a draft of it with his cabinet in July, he wrote a letter in response to an editorial by Horace Greeley of the New York Tribune which had urged complete abolition:

I would save the Union. I would save it the shortest way under the Constitution. The sooner the national authority can be restored; the nearer the Union will be “the Union as it was.” If there be those who would not save the Union, unless they could at the same time save slavery, I do not agree with them. If there be those who would not save the Union unless they could at the same time destroy slavery, I do not agree with them. My paramount object in this struggle is to save the Union, and is not either to save or to destroy slavery. If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it, and if I could save it by freeing all the slaves I would do it; and if I could save it by freeing some and leaving others alone I would also do that. What I do about slavery, and the colored race, I do because I believe it helps to save the Union; and what I forbear, I forbear because I do not believe it would help to save the Union. I shall do less whenever I shall believe what I am doing hurts the cause, and I shall do more whenever I shall believe doing more will help the cause. I shall try to correct errors when shown to be errors; and I shall adopt new views so fast as they shall appear to be true views.

I have here stated my purpose according to my view of official duty; and I intend no modification of my oft-expressed personal wish that all men everywhere could be free.

Just one month after writing this letter, Lincoln issued his first Emancipation Proclamation, which announced that at the beginning of 1863, he would use his war powers to free all slaves in states still in rebellion (as they came under Union control).

Total equality was another matter. He did not say they had a right to complete equality with white American citizens. In the September 18, 1858 debate, Lincoln said:

I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races – that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of making voters or jurors of Negroes, nor of qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. And in as much as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.

However, this may have been a strategy speech used to gain voters too, as Douglas had accused Lincoln of favoring negroes too much as well.

During the American Civil War, Lincoln used the war powers of the presidency to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared “all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free” but exempted border states and those areas of slave states already under Union control. As a practical matter, at first the Proclamation could only be enforced to free those slaves that had already escaped to the Union side. However, millions more were freed as more areas of the South came under Union control.

Other Events on this Day

• In 1824…
  The presidential election goes to the U.S. House since neither John Quincy Adams, Andrew Jackson, William Crawford, or Henry Clay had won an electoral majority (Adams is eventually chosen).
• In 1862…
  Abraham Lincoln reminds the nation that America is the “last best hope of earth”.
• In 1903…
  Thomas Edison’s film company releases The Great Train Robbery, the first western movie.
• In 1955…
  Rosa Parks is arrested after she refuses to give up her seat to a white man aboard a bus in Montgomery, Alabama, prompting a bus boycott by blacks.
• In 1965…
  An airlift begins to bring thousands fleeing Castro’s Communist Cuba to the United States.

Dates and events based on:

William J. Bennett and John Cribb, (2008) The American Patriot’s Almanac Daily Readings on America. (Kindle Edition)

Background information is from Wikipedia articles on:

Lincoln’s Message on Slavery that can be found at…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Lincoln_on_slavery