Bill Brandt’s social reportage was to make him a definitive photographer of the English people – and yet he was born in Hamburg, learnt his art in Surrealist Paris, and only moved to London in 1931. At the end of World War II he turned from reportage to the landscape, pairing passages from English literature with his own images, exploring the constituent parts of the national imagination. One of the writers Brandt most admired was Thomas Hardy, in whose novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), fate is pitched against socio-economic circumstance. Stonehenge, the enormous prehistoric circle, is an epic setting for the tragic climax. The heroine performs a kind of self-sacrifice, laying herself to rest on one of the megaliths:

The uniform concavity of black cloud was lifting bodily like the lid of a pot, letting in at the earth's edge the coming day, against which the towering monoliths and trilithons began to be blackly defined.

Stonehenge, thought to be a place of sacrifice to the sun, has particular potency in the hands of a photographer who worships light and dark. In Brandt’s photograph, the stones appear black against the light of the sky and against the bleak snowy foreground: the high contrast makes the image appear almost like a negative. He turns a hugely familiar landmark into something strange.

Brandt had Stonehenge in mind as a subject for years. 'When I have found a landscape which I want to photograph,’ he said, ‘I wait for the right season, the right weather, and the right time of day or night, to get the picture which I know to be there.' Opportunity knocked with the legendary ‘big freeze’ of 1947 – Britain’s worst winter in a century. Snow began to fall on 23 January, bringing the war-torn country to its knees. Stockpiles froze, coal mining slowed, roads and trains were blocked; food rationing hit a new low, power stations closed and power cuts were introduced; broadcasting was limited and newsprint rationing meant newspaper sizes were slashed and magazines put on hold. When the snows finally started to thaw in March, they caused devastating floods, destroying crops and cattle. 

This was a time of intense national introspection. On 19 April the magazine Picture Post had been closed for two weeks, but scrimped paper together for a ‘special issue on the crisis’ by cutting the length of later issues. Brandt’s photograph of Stonehenge made an arresting front cover. Inside, an article asks, ‘What is Britain’s place in the changed new world?’ The country’s island status had been emphasised by the war, and new anxieties over Britain’s dwindling power were tied to questions about self-sufficiency. In the face of proliferating short-term troubles, Brandt makes the distant past loom large. How Stonehenge was erected, at over seven metres high, remains an enigma, and its function a mystery, but in 1947 its silhouette offered the British a powerful outline of endeavour and endurance.

Text by Dorothy Feaver