Visual Culture

Question 1

Visual Culture Secondary Literature

Summarise the findings of Stephen Brooke, ‘War and the Nude: The Photography of Bill Brandt’

Answer 1

• Discusses the photos of Bill Brandt, an iconic photographer of the 20th century, who contributed to Picture Post and Lilliput. Experimented with nudes between the war and 1960s, revealing much about the positioning of the female body through the gaze of the male eye. Framing of the picture has been described as Brandt giving ‘illicit entry’ to a ‘forbidden chamber’ - ideas of transgressing social rules and and fetish arises. Draws on techniques from film noire, which drew heavily on female sexuality. Brandt as providing counter narrative to government espoused values at the time.

Question 2

Visual Culture Secondary Literature

Summarise the findings of Stephen Brooke, ‘Revisiting Southam Street: Generation, Gender and Race in the Photography of Roger Mayne’

Answer 2

• Revisiting Southam Street is also a way of thinking about the persistence and representation of working-class poverty in an age of affluence. Mayne’s photographs are often taken as the representation of a working-class community at a decisive moment, the moment before that community was lost, literally, to the bulldozers, and, metaphorically, to the effects of postwar rehousing, immigration, and affluence.
• Mayne’s photographs are representations of working-class identity and community, not at the point of disappearance, but rather at a moment when working-class identity and community were being reworked and rearticulated. This reworking and rearticulation occurred within the context of class, not outside of it.
• By the time Mayne began photographing Southam Street in the 1950s, therefore, there was a tradition of street and documentary photography that had set up particular ways of representing working-class streets and working-class people while, at the same time, reflecting the middle-class eye.