Photographer Bill Brandt

Submitted by Al …

(Adapted from The Encyclopedia of Photography ©1963)

Bill Brandt is a highly-respected British photographer. In a sense, Bill Brandt is a photographer’s photographer – other photographers have been consistently stirred and stimulated to new thinking by his pictures.

An example of this occurred in his book Perspective of Nudes. These powerful pictures have fascinated and won the admiration of major artists in the other visual arts; Picasso, Braque and sculptor Henry Moore, as well as photographers everywhere.

Prior to Perspective of Nudes, Bill Brandt won recognition for his volume The English at Home, published in the 1930s. This volume, now a collector’s item, shows the English people in the course of their everyday lives and pictures them with candor, sympathy, and humour.

Another powerful book by Brandt, A Night in London, gives a sense of the myriad of people and situations encountered during a single night in one of the world’s largest cities.

In his book, Literary Britain, Brandt did a series of photographs conveying the basic mood of selected literary classics.

During World War II, in the midst of the Blitz, Bill Brandt took a memorable series of pictures living in the gray underground world of air raid shelters. In the years since the war his pictures have appeared frequently in magazines such as Picture Post, Harper’s Bazaar, and Holiday.

In his startling book, Perspective of Nudes, Bill Brandt shows the results of a fifteen-year exploration of this subject. These pictures are full of mystery; symbolic nude figures in shadowy romantic interiors and abstractions of parts of the body photographed in landscapes of beaches, cliffs, and the distant ocean. All of the pictures were taken with an extreme wide-angle lens and much of their power derives from the manner in which the wide-angle lens distorts figures, or parts of the figure; a hand, or a leg, that are placed in the foreground. In many of these nude studies, the model’s body seems to stretch out for miles, almost like a landscape in itself.

Brandt uses an unusual camera for this work. It is an old wooden view camera with a pinhole-type wide-angle lens permanently fixed on infinity. It has no shutter. This camera, (Kodak Wide Angle Camera with a Zeiss Jena f18/85mm Protar lens) formerly used by Scotland Yard for making records, has an aperture so small he can hardly view the picture in the groundglass. Brandt said that he wanted a lens that would help him see ‘…perhaps like a mouse, a fish, or a fly.’ Using this antiquated camera and working by trial and error, he has revealed the human body in a way never seen before.

Bill Brandt’s pictures contain a very large atmosphere of mystery, even when he is shooting the everyday life of Londoners. In his book Camera in London, he describes this characteristic element in his photographs as follows: ‘Thus it was I found atmosphere to be the spell that charges the commonplace with beauty. I still am not sure what atmosphere is. I should be hard put to define it. I only know it is a combination of elements … which reveals the subject as familiar and yet strange …’