Bill Brandt: Portraits

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The English at Home. Introduction by Raymond Mortimer. London: B. T. Batsford/New York: C. Scribner's, 1936. Feeling frustrated by modern cameras and lenses which seemed designed to imitate human vision and conventional sight, I was looking everywhere for a camera with a very wide angle. One day in a second hand shop, near Covent Garden, I found a 70-year-old wooden Kodak. I was delighted. Like nineteenth-century cameras it had no shutter, and the wide-angle lens, with an aperture as minute as a pinhole, was focused on infinity. Bill Brandt Perspective of Nudes. Preface by Lawrence Durrell, introduction by Chapman Mortimer. London: The Bodley Head/New York: Amphoto, 1961.

Brandt’s collages and color photographs were exhibited in London in the mid-1970s, and again ten years after his death in 1992. 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.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.' a b c d "Bill Brandt Biography". Victoria and Albert Museum. 2004. Archived from the original on 19 May 2010 . Retrieved 30 March 2010. During his five-decade career, Brandt produced important work in all the major genres of photography: social documentary, landscape, nude, and portrait. Brandt greatly admired the work of fellow photographer and close friend Brassaï. In fact, Brandt’s second book, A Night in London (1938) was based on Brassaï’s Paris de Nuit (1933). In 2010, an English Heritage blue plaque for Brandt was erected in London at 4 Airlie Gardens, Kensington, W8. [6] Exhibitions [ edit ]

Novelist; author of The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart (both 1935) Published Harper’s Bazaar, N.Y., April 1946, and Lilliput, November 1949 In that catalog, in the chapter about portraiture, Brandt himself is quoted as having said: "The photographer has to wait until something between dreaming and action occurs in the expression of the face."

Bill Brandt | Photographer | Blue Plaques | English Heritage". english-heritage.org.uk . Retrieved 23 July 2022. In 2003 the V&A acquired two albums containing some 400 photographs, mainly by Bill Brandt. The albums were compiled in the years 1928-39 by his first wife Eva Boros. They illustrate Brandt's early photographic experiments as he travelled with Eva from Vienna to Hungary, Hamburg, Paris, Barcelona and Madrid before finally settling in London in 1934. Bill Brandt: A Retrospective Exhibition. Catalogue, introduction by David Mellor. Bath: Royal Photographic Society/National Centre of Photography, 1981. Bill Brandt: Early Photographs, 1930–1942. Exhibition catalogue, introduction by Peter Turner. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1975.