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We will process the personal data you have supplied in accordance with our privacy policy available on request. You can unsubscribe or change your preferences at any time by clicking the link in our emails. Bill Brandt. View works. Site by Artlogic. His second book, A Night in Londonexhibited scenes of the city at night with no flash, highlighting the effects of the blackout.

After the war Brandt remained in Britain and photographed the landscape associated with English literature called Literary Britain in A decade later he would publish one of his most iconic series titled Perspective of Nudes. This study of the human form was taken with a seventy-year-old wooden Kodak with no shutter and a pinhole aperature set to infinity.

The combination of the wide angle used to capture extreme close ups of limbs, against jagged cliffs and rocky beaches in the background resulted in highly distorted, surreal composition. It is a medium via which messages reach us from another world. Bill Brandt suffered from diabetes for over 40 years and on December 20th,he passed away. A subject placed squarely in the centre of the frame, if attention is not distracted from it by fussy surroundings, has a simple dignity which makes it all the more impressive".

One of Brandt's most famous images, Stonehenge under Snow captures the megalithic prehistoric monument during the "big freeze" of Britain's worst winter in over a century. The image put down Brandt's marker in the proud and long timeline of great English landscapists. The image itself uses high contrast, rendering the monument nearly black, and appearing almost to float above the white, snowy field in the foreground.

The sky above is equally dramatic, with the sunlight bullying its way through the clouds. Arts writer Dorothy Feaver notes that "Stonehenge, thought to be a place of sacrifice to the sun, has particular potency in the hands of a photographer who worships light and dark. In Brandt's photograph, [ He turns a hugely familiar landmark into something strange".

This photograph was commissioned by Picture Post to serve as their cover image in April It sat under the sub-title "Where Stands Britain? It addressed what was one of the most newsworthy events of the moment, the "big freeze", which temporarily crippled the nation, as stockpiles froze, coal mining was slowed down, road and railway traffic was blocked, power stations closed, and food rationing became tighter.

When the spring thaw started, flooding followed doing harm to crop and cattle farming.

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Art historians Martina Droth and Paul Messier cite Stonehenge under Snow as a "turning point" in Brandt's career, when he "moved away from the socio-political images of depression-era and wartime Britain and became focused on a more subjective engagement with the landscape and the body". They add that "While capturing a newsworthy moment in time, the image also represents a timeless view of a mythic ancient symbol of the nation.

Its artful and elegiac composition points to Brandt's interest in strong contrast, silhouette, and the use of large expanses of the picture space where visual detail is reduced to almost nothing". In his forward to Brandt's collection, Perspectives of Nudes the novelist Chapman Mortimer stated that when looking at the images in the book, "one thinks, again and again, Sculpture, sculpture".

East Sussex Coast was one of several abstract nude photographs that Brandt took, placing body parts here, a bent elbow so close to the camera lens that they lose definition, and appear almost like Surrealist sculptures. Like many of these images, this was taken on a stone beach. As Droth and Messier assert "The beach provided Brandt with an evocative setting for blending body and nature.

A pair of knees are arranged like boulders stacked on top of each other. The fingers of a hand blend into a bed of pebbles; a torso and elbow echo the shapes of the cliffs". These works were published in Brandt's photobook Perspectives of Nudes. Droth and Messier argue that the collection "Unlike his other preoccupations, including landscape, photojournalism, and portraits, the nude for Brandt was less an avenue for commercial success and more a potent platform for creativity, experimentation, and discovery [ As Brandt himself explained, his images before were "dark and muddy", but after his preference grew for "the very contrasting black-and-white effect [which is] crisper, more dramatic, and very different from color photographs".

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Of all his works, Brandt's late career nudes, which share certain similarities with the famous cropped nudes of American Edward Weston, did most to reinforce the close connection between photography which remains, in essence, an objective, mechanical, medium and fine art. Brandt is interested here, not in eroticism, but rather the sculptural form in this case, the human body and its relationship to the natural landscape.

Indeed, Life magazine juxtaposed Brandt's nudes with images of Aristide Maillol's carvings, making the connection between the two mediums explicit. This image is in fact one of many that reflects Brandt's close friendship with Henry Moore and was made shortly after the photographer had visited the coastal town of St Ives to photograph the sculptures of Barbara Hepworth which he had also positioned on the beach.

In this charismatic portrait of one of Britain's premier figurative painters, Francis Bacon stands, visible from the waist-up, at the bottom-left quarter of the image. His brow furrowed, Bacon looks downward, past the camera to the left. Behind him, an expansive grassy park is visible, dotted with autumnal trees. The twilight sky is cloudy and moody, and a tall, illuminated streetlight stands behind Bacon, just to the left of a footpath visible on the right edge of the photo.

Brandt became well-known for his portrait work, and in the s he photographed several significant artists and bill brandt photographer biography ads cultural figures. His preference was to place the subject at the far side of the image, and to capture his subjects with more reflective expressions. Brandt once stated that it was important for portraits to still look good "twenty years later" and that "laughing pictures are very irritating to look at".

Generally, he didn't want his subjects to look posed and noted that "people don't pose for long" in any case and would thus bide his time before exposing the image. For this portrait, Brandt asked Bacon to wait for quite some time in order to catch just the right lighting conditions of twilight. 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.

A notoriously private man although happy to talk about his art details of Brandt's personal life are scarce at best. Hermann Wilhelm Brandt was one of four sons born to a British father and German mother both of Russian descent in Hamburg. He spent most of his youth in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany, where he attended school, and then in a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, where he underwent prolonged treatment for tuberculosis.

Brandt and his brother, R. Rolfwere often bullied at school due to their British heritage. The brothers formed a close bond and took drawing lessons together at the Kunstgewerbeschule a vocational arts school. In the late s and early s, Rolf who went on to attend the Bauhaus school in Dessau created several series of collagesusing source materials from new photographic magazines such as Der Querschnittand to which Brandt himself contributed some early photographs.

The teenage Brandt took up photography as a serious hobby while convalescing at the sanatorium. He would remain a resident there until he was twenty-two. In aged 23 he travelled to Vienna to consult with a lung specialist. While there, he met the writer, philanthropist, and socialite, Eugenie Schwarzwald whose home doubled as a social meeting point for Vienna's intellectual elite.

Schwarzwald, who had already helped him secure a job at the portrait studio of the photographer Greta Kolliner, introduced Brandt to the American poet Ezra Pound at his residence in Pound sat for a portrait, and the American was so impressed with the results, he offered to introduce Brandt to American photographer Man Ray who maintained his primary studio in Paris.

In Brandt relocated to Paris, where he spent three months apprenticing at Man Ray's studio. Brandt later recalled, "For any young photographer at that time, Paris was the centre of the world. Those were the exciting early days when the French poets and surrealists recognised the possibilities of photography". He learned new technical tricks from Man Ray including the use of the high grain aesthetic effect, as well as radical picture cropping techniques.

Brandt spent the next three years traveling with his camera around Europe, visiting the Hungarian steppe, Hamburg, Madrid, and Barcelona. Born in HamburgGermany, son of a British father and German mother, Brandt grew up during World War I, during which his father, who had lived in Germany since the age of five, was interned for six months by the Germans as a British citizen.

He was, in any case, pronounced cured and was taken under the wing of socialite Eugenie Schwarzwald. When Ezra Pound visited the Schwarzwald residence, Brandt made his portrait. In appreciation, Pound reportedly offered Brandt an introduction to Man Raywhose Paris studio and darkroom Brandt would access in In Brandt moved to London and began documenting all levels of British society.

From he began to document the British class system inencouraged by his reading of George Orwell 's essays and J. Priestley 's An English JourneyHe said later: "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.

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He then focused predominantly on recording domestic scenes of miners in Northumberlandand then the urban landscape of Halifax, West Yorkshireof which he later said, in a rare late career interview, as being "absolutely extraordinary; a real dream town — I'd never seen anything like it before. This kind of documentary was uncommon at that time.

He documented the Underground bomb shelters of London during The Blitz incommissioned by the Ministry of Information. During World War II Brandt concentrated on many subjects — as can be seen in his Camera in London but excelled in portraiture and landscape. To mark the arrival of peace in he began a celebrated series of nudes. His major books from the post-war period are Literary Britainand Perspective of Nudesfollowed by a compilation of his best work, Shadow of Light Brandt became Britain's most influential and internationally admired photographer of the 20th century.

Many of his works have important social commentary but also poetic resonance. His landscapes and nudes are dynamic, intense and powerful, often using wide-angle lenses and distortion.