Time exposure

It is difficult now to imagine the impact of Brodrick Haldane's first photographs, taken in the 1930s when social photography was an entirely new phenomenon. But at the time, they revealed a hitherto unseen world of gaiety and glamour. Born into the Scottish aristocracy, Haldane was readily accepted into the best circles where others were turned away. After school at Lancing, the shy youth began using his vest-pocket Kodak camera to photograph his friends at parties in the London of the 1930s. Soon he was spending summers in the South of France and winters in Switzerland or Austria, chronicling the exploits of international society - the Queen Mother, the Aga Khan and Margaret, Duchess of Argyll were among his better-known subjects. When the Second World War broke out, Brodrick joined the 83rd Battery, and his experiences as Gunner Haldane are among the funniest moments in the book. After the war, he settled in Lausanne as the guest of his friend the Countess d'Antraigues, and throughout the 1950s mixed with the likes of Marlene Dietrich, Charlie Chaplin, the exiled Queen of Spain and Noel Coward. In the sixties Haldane returned to Scotland and bought a flat in Edinburgh, where he was to hold court for the next thirty years. Six months before he died, he began recounting his life's escapades to Roddy Martine. He had just finished reading the latest draft of his memoirs on the afternoon before his death.