Perspective of Nudes. Preface by Lawrence Durrell, introduction by Chapman Mortimer. London: The Bodley Head/New York: Amphoto, 1961. He used his family ties to document the wealthy alongside the poor. Many of these images were staged, with family and friends acting out the scenes he wished to create. Hermann Wilhelm Brandt, born into an Anglo-German family in Hamburg, was a schoolboy in Germany during the First World War and learnt photography in a Viennese studio in the 1920s. He also spent a brief time with Man Ray in Paris before settling in London in the 1930s. Taking hard-edged documentary photographs during the Depression for Picture Post and Weekly Illustrated helped establish his reputation, as did his first books The English at Home (1936) and A Night in London (1938). The former contains his classic pictures of a day in the life of a domestic servant, published in Picture Post and recently included in the Gallery's Below Stairs exhibition. To light the scenes, he either used street lights or transportable tungsten lights (also known as photo floods). Bill Brandt: A Centenary Retrospective, Victoria & Albert Museum, London. Curated by John-Paul Kernot. [9] [10]

Editor note: If you enjoy our Bill Brandt article and find it helpful, then we would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers through your own blog, social media and forums.The extreme social contrast, during those years before the war, was, visually, very inspiring for me. I started by photographing in London, the West End, the suburbs, the slums.' His photography is held in several public collections, including the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Art historian. Author of many important studies on painting. Produced popular series on television, Civilization. Although Brandt’s photography career began with his portrait of Ezra Pound in 1928, he didn’t return to the genre until the 1940s.

After several years of working on the project, he published his first book, The English at Homein 1936. In the 1920s he went off to Paris to study with Man Ray. Years later, Brandt credited the surrealist photographer with broadening his skills. More importantly, Ray inspired in him a new excitement about photography and the world. Man Ray appreciated young Brandt’s darkroom expertisem but at the time didn’t think much of his photography. He would later reassess his opinion and credit Brandt with infusing English photography with elements of surrealism and the avant-garde. Photographs by Bill Brandt. Introduction by Mark Haworth-Booth. Washington DC: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1980. A Night in London. The story of a London night. London: Country Life/New York: C. Scribner's/Paris: Arts et Métiers Graphiques, 1938. The V&A explains that "During the World Wars, suspended social life, long railway journeys and the need to reaffirm ideas of national identity all encouraged a return to the literary classics. Brandt shared in this. He read and admired the writings of the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy, George Crabbe and John Clare, some of whose poems he knew by heart. From 1945 onwards Brandt contributed a series of landscape photographs, accompanied by texts selected from British writers, to Lilliput, a British monthly magazine, founded by the photojournalist Stefan Lorant that focused on short stories, humour, photography and art. Other landscapes appeared in Picture Post and the American magazine Harper's Bazaar". Lilliput also took the "daring" decision to publish some of Brandt's early nudes.Prints of the catalogue numbers 1 to 92 were made under the photographer’s supervision especially for the exhibition. The following vintage prints date from the time when the photographs were taken. He decided to pursue a career in photojournalism, a profession still in its infancy. However, Brandt was a photojournalist with a difference. For under the tutelage of Man Ray, Brandt had developed his own moody, surreal style.

Brandt, Bill with preface by Lawrence Durrell, introduction by Chapman Mortimer. Perspective of Nudes. London: Bodley Head, 1961.

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He probably took up photography as an amateur enthusiast when he was a patient undergoing treatment for tuberculosis in a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, in the 1920s. In 1927 he travelled to Vienna, where he was taken up by Dr Eugenie Schwarzwald. She found him a position in a portrait studio. It is likely that she also introduced him to the American poet Ezra Pound. Pound apparently gave Brandt an immensely valuable introduction to Man Ray. Bill Brandt (born Hermann Wilhelm Brandt; 2 May 1904 – 20 December 1983) [1] :14 was a British photographer and photojournalist. Born in Germany, Brandt moved to England, where he became known for his images of British society for such magazines as Lilliput and Picture Post; later he made distorted nudes, portraits of famous artists and landscapes. He is widely considered to be one of the most important British photographers of the 20th century. [1] Life and work [ edit ] Photograph of a North London air raid shelter taken by Brandt in 1940 While Brandt didn’t want to be pinned down to weekly assignments, he did produce quite a bit of work for Lilliput and Picture Posr and, later, Harper’s Bazaar. In fact, all his work in portraiture was commissioned by commercial magazines. He took these assignments seriously, wanting the photographs to be more than snapshots that only showed a likeness at a given moment. His images of Britain’s cultural, artistic and literary figures were meant to last.

Brandt's first one-man show in the United States was at Eastman House in Rochester, New York, in 1963, and was followed by a full retrospective at MoMA, New York, in 1969. MoMA introduced him in its catalogue as "the artist who defined the potential of photographic modernism in England for much of the twentieth century". In his last years, Brandt's output was however largely restricted to commissioned portraits and a teaching post at London's Royal College of Art (which had awarded him an honorary doctorate). Brandt (like Moore) had also experimented with assemblages formed of found objects. These were published in 1993 as Bill Brandt: The Assemblages. Using the fixed-focus camera with a wide-angle lens, allowed him to create heavily distorted images and “see like a mouse, a fish or a fly.” a b Buggins, Joanne (1989). "An appreciartion of the shelter photographs taken by Bill Brandt in November 1940". Imperial War Museum Review. 4: 32–42. Other gifts include Underground shelter photographs commissioned by the Ministry of Information in 1940 and donated by Sir Fife Clark in 1981, and six early works from Vienna and the Great Hungarian Plain given by Mr and Mrs J.R. Marsh in 1999. It is the result that counts, no matter how it was achieved. I find the darkroom work most important, as I can finish the composition of a picture only under the enlarger. I do not understand why this is supposed to interfere with the truth. Photographers should follow their own judgment, and not the fads and dictates of others. Bill Brandt The PrintBrandt assisted Man Ray in Paris for several months in 1930. Here he witnessed the heyday of Surrealist film and grasped the new poetic possibilities of photography. Art critic Megan Williams suggests that Brandt's celebrity portraits had brought his oeuvre full circle. She wrote, "Despite being taken in an altogether different stage of his diverse photography career, Brandt's portrait of Bacon bears parallels with his earlier photojournalism - it is compelling, curious and still, filled with a sense of cloudy unease". One might also observe that the fact so many icons of twentieth century European modernism were willing to sit (some of them for his more esoteric extreme-close shot series of famous eyes) for Brandt - among them Henry Moore, Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte, Max Ernst, Louise Nevelson, Alberto Giacometti - was itself an endorsement of the reverence reserved for Brandt amongst his peers. Brandt’s use of a wide-angle lens is another very striking feature of his innovative photographic practice. He initially intended to use this type of lens to photograph large and great ceilings, but later realized that it also distorts subjects up close, noting that he had “never planned that.” Although this was a new discovery for Brandt, it soon became almost his signature aesthetic, and is especially evident in his nudes. Placing the camera very close to his subjects, the wide angle enlarges the foreground to a great degree, making body parts look highly disproportionate. Prime examples of these are found in “Campden Hill, August 1953” and “Hampstead, London, 1952” —in the latter, the subject’s feet are so distorted that they hide the rest of her body. This wide-angle technique gives many of Brandt’s nudes a highly surreal quality, in which the human body expands and warps into bizarre forms. Brandt’s work is thus particularly subversive given the history of the nude in art, which had long privileged proportion and symmetry. Priestly described the condition of the north east, where the effects of the Depression and the closure of ship-building yards had resulted in 80% unemployment: 'The whole town looked as if it had entered a perpetual penniless bleak Sabbath. The men wore the drawn masks of prisoners of war'. Brandt carefully documented coal-searching - the retrieval of small lumps of coal from spoil heaps - and the domestic life of miners. Author of The Young Visitors, a children’s classic, written when she was nine, but not published until 1919