Bill Brandt: Portraits

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Brandt's last years were spent reissuing his work in a series of books published by Gordon Fraser. He taught Royal College of Art photography students and continued to accept commissions for portraits. He selected an exhibition for the Victoria and Albert Museum titled ‘The Land: 20th Century Landscape Photographs’ (1975) and was working on another show, 'Bill Brandt’s Literary Britain', when he died after a short illness in 1983. 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.' In addition to Surrealism, early Brandt photographs experiment with angular modernist styles and night photography. He travelled in continental Europe with Eva Boros, whom he had met in the Vienna portrait studio. They married in Barcelona in 1932. Shortly after, the first collection of Brandt’s photographs were published. 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. In the immediate post-war years Brandt showed his willingness to evolve by turning to more creative works. By now Brandt was experimenting with an extremely wide-angle lens (originally designed for industry) which lent his landscapes, most evident in his iconic image of the prehistoric Stonehenge monument, a vast impression of space and depth. His experimentations with the same lens on close shots of the human body, meanwhile, brought his nudes a uniquely distorted, or abstract, quality.

Bill Brandt Works from the 1940s and Harper's Bazaar". William Holman Gallery . Retrieved 24 June 2020.Although there was little direct teaching from Man Ray, Brandt was able to absorb the new developments in photography and various art movements in Paris. Photographs by Bill Brandt. Introduction by Mark Haworth-Booth. Washington DC: International Exhibitions Foundation, 1980. I consider it essential that the photographer should do his own printing and enlarging. The final effect of the finished print depends so much on these operations. And only the photographer himself knows the effect he wants. He should know by instinct, grounded in experience, what subjects are enhanced by hard or soft, light or dark treatment. But … no amount of toying with shades of print or with printing papers will transform a commonplace photograph into anything other than a commonplace photograph… It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. Bill Brandt Manipulating the Negative

For his photojournalism and portrait work, Brandt used a Rolleiflex. From the 1950s, he used a Hasselblad with a Zeiss Biogon 38mm super wide-angle lens for his landscape and nude photography. Poet Laureate. A pioneer in the revival of interest in Victorian architecture, and other unfashionable subjects There have been important Brandt acquisitions since then, including eight vintage prints donated by Bill Brandt himself in 1980. Brandt disliked his muted earlier (vintage) prints but, as the Museum asked for them for the benefit of photography students, graciously gave examples. These included such photographs as 'Gull’s Nest, Isle of Skye',1947.

After his health stabilized, Brandt needed to decide what to do with his life. A therapist he had seen in Vienna while visiting his brother Rolf suggested he try photography. Brandt apprenticed himself at the Grete Kolliner studio, where he worked for nearly three years perfecting his darkroom techniques. Bill Brandt is regarded as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century. He is best known for his surrealist influenced nudes and his photos of London during the Blitz. 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. Brandt spent the next three years traveling (with his camera) around Europe, visiting the Hungarian steppe, Hamburg, Madrid, and Barcelona. In 1932, he married Eva Boros (the first of three wives), whom he had first met at Kollinger's studio. The couple set up home in the north London area of Belsize Park. In 1934, the Paris-based Surrealist magazine Minotaure published one of Brandt's early images, but England was to provide the inspiration for his most famous photographs. Around this time Brandt was also experimenting with montage techniques that combined portions of two or more negatives in one print. One of his best-known examples was an image called Early Morning on the River (1935). It features a seagull in flight that was superimposed onto a shot of a foggy River Thames. (Later, Brandt added a morning sun to the scene for a commissioned magazine feature.)

Towards the end of the war, my style changed completely. I have often been asked why this happened. I think I gradually lost my enthusiasm for reportage. Documentary photography had become fashionable. Everybody was doing it. Besides, my main theme of the past few years had disappeared; England was no longer a country of marked social contrast. Bill Brandt Please note: sitters’ biographical dates have been updated from the original hand list. Updated December 2012).

The Museum of Modern Art has taken on the task of distilling Brandt's lifetime oeuvre into a comprehensive retrospective, which opened Wednesday. The exhibition's catalog describes him as "the artist who defined the potential of photographic modernism in England for much of the twentieth century." In 1977, Brandt began a second series of nudes, which appeared along with some earlier photographs in the book Nudes 1945-1980(1981).

Supporter of the Liberal Party and the League of Nations. A governor of the BBC. Published Harper’s Bazaar, N.Y., July 1945 Cyril Connolly published Brandt's shelter photographs in Horizon in February 1942. In 1966 Connolly wrote that '"Elephant and Castle 3.45 a.m." eternalises for me the dreamlike monotony of wartime London.' Brandt himself recalled 'the long alley of intermingled bodies, with the hot, smelly air and continual murmur of snores'.Some early photographs are modelled on works by the French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927). Atget made a living selling his photographs, mainly of old Paris, to painters, designers and libraries. In the 1920s he was taken up by Man Ray and other Surrealists as a major photographer in his own right.