BILL BRANDT
Bill Brandt (1904-1983) is one of the acknowledged masters of twentieth-century photography, credited with revising and renewing the major artistic genres of portraiture, landscape and the nude. Although he was born in Germany, Brandt moved to London where he became one of the first documentary photographers of British society and published two books showcasing his work, The English at Home (1936) and A Night in London (1938). His life’s work constitutes one of the most varied and vivid social documents of Great Britain, ranging from stark realism and social commentary to pure abstraction and surrealism.
Brandt began his career in Paris in 1929, where the arts were thriving and photography was gaining recognition as an art form with great potential. Whilst there Brandt absorbed the influence of the surrealist Man Ray and his precursor Eugène Atget. On arriving in England he was struck by the extreme social disparity during the years before the war and photographed everything that went on inside the large houses of the wealthy – elaborate cocktail parties, drawing room games and dinner banquets, as well as the servants in the kitchen and parlour maids preparing baths for the family – alongside the living conditions of the working classes and the leisure pursuits of bourgeois society. Brandt made his sharpest social reporting in northern cities where he photographed mass unemployment and hardship of the mining community in 1937 – frank and direct images that were not published until the 40s when they came to symbolise a very different time, the post-war ‘Age of Austerity’.
Towards the end of the war, Brandt’s style changed completely and he began to photograph nudes, portraits and landscape. His images show a particular sensitivity to weather, season, light and the time of day. Instead of photographing what he saw, he photographed what the camera was seeing; the use of acute distortion achieved by means of a wide-angle lens and deep-focus allowed him to use to convey the sense of weight of a body or the lightness of a movement. His photographs of nudes are intense and confrontational, and often depict the body as landscape. In recognition of his contribution to photography, Brandt received a major retrospective exhibition at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London in 2004.