Photo-Op: Graven Images

The photographer Bill Brandt had a sense not just for the landscape of Britain but the culture it gave rise to. A photographic review of "Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light."

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Jon L. Stryker/Bill Brandt Archive Ltd.

London is filthy with plaques noting where some poet or novelist once lived. But what do we learn of 'Oliver Twist' or 'Nicholas Nickleby' from the house in which Dickens wrote them (48 Doughty Street)? In one of her first forays into journalism, Virginia Woolf pondered 'Great Men's Houses,' visiting the house (24 Cheyne Row) where Thomas and Jane Carlyle lived and concluding that it was a 'battlefield where daily, summer and winter, mistress and maid fought against dirt and cold for cleanliness and warmth.' The place told a great deal about a tense marriage but not much about literature. When photographer Bill Brandt began pondering 'Literary Britain' in the 1940s, it was the landscapes from which writers sprang that he sought. Brandt depicted Robert Louis Stevenson through the fog-bound turrets of Edinburgh Castle and George Crabbe via a lonely fisherman on Aldeburgh Beach. The churchyard at Haworth (above), where the Rev. Patrick Brontë was vicar, stands in for his death-haunted daughters. The dark, uneven memorials evoke a dank, harsh place where Jane Eyre and Lowood School, the Grange and Wuthering Heights, and the gossip-encouraging seclusion of Wildfell Hall were born. Brandt is celebrated in 'Shadow and Light' (Museum of Modern Art, 208 pages, $50), whose selections of works from books like 'The English at Home' (1936), 'A Night in London' (1938) and 'Camera in London' (1948) show his deep sense of the country. What might surprise is that Brandt was only half-English—born and raised in Hamburg, Germany. His art was a way to assert his preferred nationality. The book 'Literary Britain' (1951) showed that the nation's landscape fed more than the people; it fed an imagination. No one sees a place so clearly as the immigrant.

—The Editors

A version of this article appeared March 23, 2013, on page C8 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: Photo-Op: Graven Images.

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Saturday, March 30, 2013