Life through a lens

Bill Brandt's sharp black-and-white documentary images of life in London and the north of England in the decades before and after the Second World War have long fed our collective memory, and seeing so many displayed in the V&A's welcome celebration serves as a reminder of the photographer's significance as a social historian.

Striking vintage prints are arranged thematically, beginning in the late 1920s, when Brandt lived in Germany, and bought his first camera. Snaps of his brother, Rolf, friends and street scenes are displayed in the photo-album made by his first wife, Eva Boros. Dated 1928-39, it shows early experiments in light and shade, reflecting Brandt's time as assistant to Man Ray in 1930.

Brandt's photography bloomed in England after 1934, when he and Rolf and their wives moved to London. The 1934 photographs, collected in a book, The English at Home, were an instant success, and many are hung here in matching pairs as originally published. Miners descending in a cage are seen next to children peering from a basement window, and all with a spontaneity that only Brandt's unassuming presence behind the camera would allow.

London by Night, another descriptive biography of the city, moves through moody dusk, daily chores and East End pub scenes reminiscent of Brassai, to milk on a doorstep. Night was Brandt's time. He harnessed moonlight in the city and the countryside, and in his darkroom created textures like velvet. His brooding images of Halifax's darkly cobbled streets and Northumberland miners' homes introduced southerners to a world as alien as Africa.

His nudes, approaching abstraction, always surprise, seeming almost the work of another photographer: huge, sensuous pools of curvaceous white flesh and elongated limbs, first achieved with a new wide-angle lens in 1950. In a 10-minute video of an interview given just before his death in 1983, Brandt admits they were his favourite photographs.

Many were shot in Rolf 's studio, surrounded by his abstract paintings. This show coincides with the National Portrait Gallery's Cecil Beaton retrospective, and together the exhibitions offer a fascinating portrait of 20th century Britain, viewed from all points along the social scale. While Beaton's context was Vogue's glossy world, Brandt worked for Picture Post.

Beaton's famously theatrical portraits colluded with his subjects' fantasies, while Brandt sought reality in working environments and penetrating close-ups (some of which are also on show at the National Portrait Gallery). He deglamourised aristocrats' lives, and preferred to enter their world through their servants' Downstairs reality.

Bill Brandt: A Centenary Retrospective at the V&A until 25 July; Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery until 30 August; Rolf Brandt: Retrospective at England & Co, W11, until 10 April.

Bill Brandt: A Centenary Retrospective