The camera does lie

Bill Brandt, one of our greatest photographers, was a man who loved secrets. He is remembered by most people for his extraordinary images of pre-war England, and especially London: a Bethnal Green girl dancing in the street, two parlourmaids preparing to serve dinner.

Others cherish his evocative landscapes - of Brontë country or blackened northern factories. For some, his late nudes crown his career: women's bodies sculpted on a beach, like rare seashells.

But nothing about Brandt is what it seems. Paul Delany makes this clear in a perceptive and lovingly researched biography, published to accompany the V&A's definitive centennial exhibition of Brandt's work (from 24 March).

Brandt used his camera to hide behind, not to reveal himself. Hamburgborn in 1904, he spent a lifetime concealing his Teutonic origins. He claimed to be from south London, though he never rid himself of a slight German accent.

His 1930s and 1940s photographs are often reprinted as evidence of the way we were then. But this is doctored history. The stunning images were carefully staged, and much re-worked in the darkroom. A tart in the street turns out to be his wife. A floozie on Brighton beach is his sister-in-law.

The parlour-maids are at his banker uncle's house. The poster-like composition of shots harks back to lithographs in children's books Brandt read in his Hamburg nursery. Every picture tells a story. But it isn't always the story you thought it was.

In his troubled youth, Brandt was sent away to a TB sanatorium in the Swiss mountains. Two of the women he married also had TB, which was then seen almost as a disease of the mind. Later he was psycho-analysed by a maverick follower of Freud, even more fanatical about sex than Sigmund was.

After all this, Brandt turned in on himself. Through his photographs he set about chronicling his obsessions. His photo-stories were either fairy tales, echoing his childhood experiences, or stories of obsessive love which dipped ever more deeply into sado-masochism the older he got.

Sometimes his interests dovetailed with magazine editors'. In his most influential years, Picture Post used him like any other photo-journalist. But Brandt always had a private income and pursued his own agenda. Much of his material was published years after he shot it.

Editorial captions skewed the images towards a manifesto for social justice which Brandt didn't really feel. Delany argues that: "He had a social conscience, certainly, but it was that of a poet rather than a politician."