Like Richard Billingham, I went to Ethiopia without quite knowing why. I had a week off work, Addis Ababa seemed as foolhardy a destination as any, and so I pre-empted good sense and bought a ticket. I mention this because Billingham's photographs of the country (a place, according to him, "where normal people wouldn't think of going") have something of the heroic pointlessness of such ventures. They are beautiful but vacant, as though his real subject was not so much Ethiopia, as a longed-for peace or emptiness, the void at the edge of the world. All of which could hardly contrast more strongly with Ray's a Laugh, the lurid family album that made Billingham's name. Whereas those pictures were taken within the formidably intense confines of his parents' council flat, the more classical photographs in his latest show at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery all derive from his subsequent wanderings. And while Ray's a Laugh evoked the grotesque, low-life poetry of Dutch genre paintings (the flung cat, the toothless grin), the new work aspires to the more rarefied sublimity of the Dutch landscape.
But in being asked to think of Cuyp and Ruysdael when we look at these photographs (the gallery blurb also mentions Claude, Turner and Constable), we are led to the edge of the gulf that separates photography from painting. On a fairly superficial level, the comparison holds up. Ethiopian Picture IV (2002) does indeed bear a certain resemblance to Cuyp's early landscapes, the reddish-brown of a scrubby roadside bank glowing beneath a pale blue sky. In terms of composition, too, these photographs have a calm grandeur that elevates them far above the average holiday snap. They seem as considered and deliberate as his earlier shots were fortuitous and snatched. Yet in appropriating the "look" of great painting, Billingham exposes photography's limitations. Whereas an Aelbert Cuyp has the magical radiance of a landscape reborn in the mind, a photograph is the result of a chemical process. The artist has been bypassed. And so all of Billingham's new pictures become images of the same melancholy absence, which is the absence of the human heart. This is just what makes them compelling (he has even spoken of wanting to "take a photograph that is not a picture of something and is just a picture of the space"), but if we come thinking of paintings we'll come away disappointed.
If photography can suffer from an excess of accuracy, showing us merely what we already know to be the case, it can also take life from any small distortions that mar the literalness of the image. In the blurred trees and strangely haloed lamps of Dusk (2002), for example, we get a hint of the transfiguration that is the essence of painting. Suspended beautifully between the known and the unknown, the natural and the supernatural, it is the finest picture in the show.
A more basic means of transfiguration, on the other hand, is simply not to use colour film. For photographers of earlier generations, this was a matter of necessity rather than choice, their images deriving an almost apocalyptic authority from the austere palette of blacks, whites and greys. One of the greatest of all photographers in black and white is Bill Brandt, whose pictures of 1930s Britain (currently showing at the relocated Focus Gallery) show a vanished country of infernal mining towns and coal-fired ranges. Brandt's photographs would be interesting enough for their documentary value alone, but they have something else that makes them more than just a record of a particular time and place. That something else is vision.
Whatever Brandt points his camera at, he seems to disclose its inner being or soul. Captions are needless, because he makes us see - peculiar as this may sound - the voice of things. This is the case whether the subject is a deserted country path, a Home Counties cocktail party or a black-faced miner tucking into his tea. In Brandt's presence, the world becomes eloquent. As I've suggested, this has partly to do with the fact that black-and-white film translates everything into a pattern of light and shadows. The absence of colour destroys the veil of ordinariness and the dream of immortality, showing a world both crueller and more alive than our own. And if Brandt moves us, it is because the pitiless intensity of his blacks - impossible to appreciate in reproduction - makes death present. The other reason that these images are so powerful has less to do with the medium and more to do with the man behind the lens, and the powerful sense of Brandt's love for his subjects. It is all a photographer can hope to achieve.
"Richard Billingham: new pictures" is at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London W1 (020 7439 2201) until 17 April
"Bill Brandt" is at the Focus Gallery, London W1 (020 7631 1150) until 26 April
