Bill Brandt British, German, 1904-1983

Bill Brandt (1904–1983) is a central figure in twentieth-century British photography, and perhaps the only photographer of his generation to achieve three total creative reinventions over the course of his career. He initially documented the British class system between the wars, then photographed London through the Blitz, and later spent two decades transforming the nude into something closer to sculpture, using a lens so wide that it stretched and flattened the body into forms the eye could not see. Any one of these bodies of work would have been enough to establish a reputation. As he progressed, he printed with increasing severity, pushing his negatives toward pure black and white until the middle tones disappeared, so that his late photographs read less as records than as inventions.

Brandt was born in Hamburg in 1904 to a British father and a German mother, a heritage he later abandoned almost entirely, telling people that he had been born in London. Tuberculosis forced him to leave school after the First World War, and he spent two and a half years at a sanatorium in Davos, where one lung was artificially collapsed and where he appears to have taken up photography. In Vienna in 1928, within the circle around the educator Eugenie Schwarzwald, he made a portrait of Ezra Pound, who introduced him to Man Ray. Brandt spent three months working in Man Ray’s Paris studio, and the Surrealism he encountered there remained with him for the next fifty years.

Brandt settled in England in 1934, and the English work came first. The English at Home (1936) and A Night in London (1938) set the households of the rich against those of the poor with a directness that was new, while in the same years he photographed the effects of the Depression in the industrial north. During the war, he photographed Londoners sheltering in the Underground for the Ministry of Information and made photographs of the blacked-out city by moonlight. He worked for Lilliput, Picture Post, and Harper’s Bazaar across four decades, gathering his London photographs in Camera in London in 1948.

From the mid-1940s, Brandt moved away from documentary photography. Literary Britain (1951) photographed the landscapes of English writers as settings for their books. In 1945, he had acquired a second-hand wooden Kodak fitted with an extremely wide lens designed for police work. Its enormous depth of field distorted whatever it was turned upon, and from then on Brandt increasingly photographed what the camera saw rather than what he saw. Perspective of Nudes (1961) gathered two decades of this work, while Shadow of Light (1966) brought the different phases of his career into a single volume.