RESERVE, TACITURNITY, AND HESITATION
BRANDT, Bill.
Stonehenge: after Thomas Hardy,
c. 1946.
Gelatin silver print, c. 229 x 197 mm (9 x 7¾ inches), photographer’s ink credit stamp ‘Bill Brandt’ on verso.
In Bill Brandt Behind the Camera, Mark Haworth-Booth writes on Brandt’s landscape photographs from the five-year period between 1945 and 1950:
‘Brandt’s vision of landscape shares many features with the sensibility, at once modern and deeply traditional, that was expressed in the contemporaneous paintings of Graham Sutherland, Paul Nash and John Piper; the music of Benjamin Britten; and the writings of the new romantic poets. Writers were at once attracted and impressed by Brandt’s literary landscapes.’
This picture was published in Lilliput in May 1946. Brandt’s book Literary Britain was published in 1951, combining literary quotations with his photographs. The text accompanying this image came from Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbevilles:
‘The band of silver paleness along the east horizon made even the distant parts of the Great Plain appear dark and near; and the whole enormous landscape bore that impress of reserve, taciturnity and hesitation which is usual just before day. The eastward pillars and their architraves stood up blackly against the light, and the great flame-shaped Sun-stone beyond them.’
Illustrated in Literary Britain, no. 47; Bill Brandt, Behind the Camera, p. 61 and Brandt, p. 167
