Bill brandt photographer photography magazine
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Bill Brandt: A World Apart
Bill Brandt, a free-spirited photographer
Somewhat forgotten over the last decade, Bill Brandt nevertheless remains an important figure in the history of the medium as an innovator in various fields, including documentary and landscape photography, portraiture, and nudes.
It is impossible to look at his work with indifference. Better yet: his images become burned into your memory.
Bill Brandt, a free-spirited photographer
This might be because Bill Brandt was a free spirit: “I am not interested in rules or conventions… Photography is not a sport,” he wrote in his book Camera in London in He was a free spirit as well as a passionate experimenter who never kept reinventing himself throughout his fifty-year-long career.
Bill Brandt started out in the surrealist Paris of the late s, at a time when, he wrote, “Paris was the center of the world.” He was a student of Man Ray: this was an important episode in his life but one which made itself felt in
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Bill Brandt's best-known work documents the vivid social contrasts in Britain during the World Wars. He also photographed the landscapes of 'Literary Britain' and a pantheon of great artists and writers.
Photographing the English
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.
Bill Brandt
Brandt visited England during the late s, and he and his first wife, Eva, settled in Belsize Park, north London, in He adopted Britain as his home and it became the subject of his greatest photographs. The majority of Brandt's earliest English photographs were first published in his photobook, The English at Home.
The young photographer used his family contacts – for example, his wealthy banker uncles – to gain access to a variety of subjects. The book contained a number of pointed social contrasts, such as the high-life presented on the front co
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Biography
Born in Hamburg, Bill Brandt was Man Ray's studio assistant in Paris in before settling in England in He worked as a freelance documentary photographer for Weekly Illustrated, Picture brev, Lilliput, and other British periodicals. During World War II, he photographed air raid shelters for the Ministry of Information and documented endangered buildings for the National Buildings Record. In he accepted portrait and mode assignments from Harper's Bazaar, thus producing fewer documentary surveys. Brandt published several books of photographs throughout his career, beginning with The English at Home (), A Night in London (), and Camera in London (). In the postwar years, his work became increasingly sammanfattning, as he experimented with a wide-angle lens and made Surrealist-inspired photographs of nudes outdoors. Brandt was included in many exhibitions during his lifetime, at, among others, the Museum of Modern Art, the George Eastman House, the National Centre of Photogra