Hellebrand, Nancy.Londoners at Home: Photographs by
Nancy Hellebrand. London: Lund Humphries; distribu-
ted in U.S. by Light Impressions.
Hellebrand, Nancy.Nancy Hellebrand ‘‘Writing’’ Catalo-
gue. New York: Pace/MacGill Gallery, 1989.
Hellebrand, Nancy. ‘‘Nancy Hellebrand: More than a
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‘‘Nancy Hellebrand: Londoners at Home.’’Creative Cam-
erano. 124 (October 1974).NIGEL HENDERSON
British
Nigel Henderson was an innovative artist working
with photography who said of his work ‘‘I’ve never
thought of myself as a photographer’’ and ‘‘I use the
camera to draw.’’ He had little interest in documen-
tary photography or the fine print, preferring to
transform reality using collage and a range of experi-
mental print techniques. His collages, which he
hoped would ‘‘stick a little bit in peoples’ craw,’’
relied on ephemera, neglected fragments, splashes,
and marks, chance and contradiction, to produce
what he described as an ‘‘expressive document,’’
which was frequently laden with personal symbolism.
As a young man growing up in London in the
1930s, Henderson met many of the foremost Eur-
opean artists, intellectuals, and writers of the period
and his work was shaped by these contacts. Al-
though he has been seen as both a pop artist and a
member of the New Brutalist movement of the
1950s, and his work has parallels with the mark-
making of Abstract Expressionism, he himself
acknowledged that his strongest influences were
Dadaism and European Surrealism.
Henderson was born in 1917 in St. Johns Wood,
London. His parents came from very different social
backgrounds and divorced when he was seven. It
was through his mother’s involvement in the art
worlds of London and Paris that, as a teenager and
young man, Henderson met members of the Blooms-
bury Group, T.S. Eliot, Bertoldt Brecht, Marcel
Duchamp, Max Ernst, and other prominent artists
and writers. He initially studied biology at Chelsea
Polytechnic but left without completing the course
andworkedasanassistantattheNationalGallery
in London from 1936–1939. At about this time, he
started painting seriously and experimenting with
collage and, through his mother’s friendship with
the American collector, Peggy Guggenheim, showed
early work in her gallery, Guggenheim Jeune.
He was 22 when war broke out and he became a
pilot in Coastal Command, an experience which
both enchanted him and left him ‘‘very, very
jumpy’’ after five years of war. Imagery from his
years of flying and time in the biology lab were
both to find their way into his later work. In
1943, he married Judith Stephens, an anthropolo-
gist and niece of Virginia Woolf, and after the war
they moved to the East End of London where she
was working on a research project. Henderson
received an ex-serviceman’s grant to study at the
Slade School of Art where he met the sculptor
Eduardo Paolozzi, who became a great friend and
collaborator on a range of projects.
By the late 1940s, Henderson was recovering from
his war experience by walking the streets around his
home in Bethnal Green, a working class area of
almost Dickensian poverty. Later he said thatI was consciously sometimes looking for chunks, bits of
typification of Englishness—including the cliche ‘British
Oak’ and all that and I still won’t avoid it, it meant
something to me. I think of these notions of the steadi-
ness of the English character—and the war brought it
out—and I found it very impressive, playing cricket in
the street for instance was something I’d longed roman-
tically to do.In 1949, while a student at the Slade School of
Fine Art, he took up photography initially in order
to record the, to him, alien and fascinating world of
Bethnal Green as source material for his work. In
three years of photographing the area he created a
remarkable visual record of a place and time. It was
his only major documentary project and, like his
collaged work, is redolent with a nostalgia for a
culture about to disappear and a fascination with
the ambiguity of reality.
When he began taking pictures Henderson enrolled
on a technical course but found it unsympathetic and
eventually taught himself photography. He alsoHENDERSON, NIGEL