Bill Brandt: Portraits

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a b Buggins, Joanne (1989). "An appreciartion of the shelter photographs taken by Bill Brandt in November 1940". Imperial War Museum Review. 4: 32–42. Although Brandt's career began, decisively, with his close-up portrait of Ezra Pound in 1928, portraiture flowered in his career only in the 1940s. He used a Rolleiflex (introduced in 1928): its ground glass provided a clear view of the subject and the 2 ¼ x 2 ¼ inch negative gave Brandt the latitude he liked for darkroom work, especially cropping. The portraits were commissioned by Lilliput, Picture Post and Harper’s Bazaar. His portrait of Dylan Thomas, for example, appeared in a feature on 'Young Poets of Democracy' in Lilliput in December 1941. 'A Gallery of Literary Artists' appeared in the same magazine in November 1949, including the Sitwells, Robert Graves, Norman Douglas, E.M. Forster and Graham Greene. Lilliput also published portraits of visual artists and composers. In the 1960s Brandt used a Hasselblad with a Superwide-angle lens, which gave his portraits a dynamic edge appropriate to the new decade. 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

Brandt’s use of a wide-angle lens is another very striking feature of his innovative photographic practice. He initially intended to use this type of lens to photograph large and great ceilings, but later realized that it also distorts subjects up close, noting that he had “never planned that.” Although this was a new discovery for Brandt, it soon became almost his signature aesthetic, and is especially evident in his nudes. Placing the camera very close to his subjects, the wide angle enlarges the foreground to a great degree, making body parts look highly disproportionate. Prime examples of these are found in “Campden Hill, August 1953” and “Hampstead, London, 1952” —in the latter, the subject’s feet are so distorted that they hide the rest of her body. This wide-angle technique gives many of Brandt’s nudes a highly surreal quality, in which the human body expands and warps into bizarre forms. Brandt’s work is thus particularly subversive given the history of the nude in art, which had long privileged proportion and symmetry. Suspended social life, long railway journeys and the need to reaffirm ideas of national identity all encouraged a return to the literary classics. Brandt shared in this. He read and admired the writings of the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy, George Crabbe and John Clare, some of whose poems he knew by heart. From 1945 onwards Brandt contributed a series of landscape photographs, accompanied by texts selected from British writers, to Lilliput. Other landscapes appeared in Picture Post and the American magazine Harper's Bazaar.

Jay, Bill and Nigel Warburton. Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt. London: Thames and Hudson, 1999. When I have found a landscape which I want to photograph, I wait for the right season, the right weather, and the right time of day or night, to get the picture which I know to be there.'

Brandt, Bill with preface by Lawrence Durrell, introduction by Chapman Mortimer. Perspective of Nudes. London: Bodley Head, 1961. In 1940, Brandt was commissioned by the government’s Ministry of Information to report on Londoners seeking refuge in underground air-raid shelters. English ed.: additional introduction by Mark Haworth-Booth. London: Gordon Fraser Gallery/New York: Da Capo, 1977.

SEVEN SEMINAL IMAGES BY BILL BRANDT

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.) Brandt's relationship with Moore, and, indeed, a general affinity with the sculptural form, saw him also photograph the work of many important sculptors including Moore, Barbara Hepworth, and Aristide Maillol. Droth writes, "Photography offered possibilities for experimentation that went beyond documentation. During Brandt's 1956 trip to St Ives to photograph Hepworth, he staged her sculptures in beach landscapes [...] in what must have been an elaborate undertaking [the pieces] were transported to the beach and photographed on the shoreline. Reclining Figure, Involute and Orpheus appear like monuments that have mysteriously risen from the seabed". Artist. From the 1960s has developed precisely patterned works which achieve retinal effect characteristic of Op Art. Bill Brandt: Portraits. Introduction by Alan Ross. London: G. Fraser/Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982.

Today Tate Britain opens a free exhibition dedicated to celebrated British photographer Bill Brandt (1904-83). 44 original photographs from across his career are displayed alongside the magazines and photobooks in which these images were most often seen. Entitled Bill Brandt: Inside the Mirror, this is Tate’s first Brandt exhibition. It reveals the secrets of his artistry and the fascinating ways he staged and refined his photographs. Drawn from Tate’s collection, the show includes many recent acquisitions which reflect Tate’s ongoing commitment to strengthening its holdings of photography. In 1984, Bill Brandt was posthumously inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum. [5] Blue plaque, 4 Airlie GardensBill Brandt: Photographs. Exhibition catalogue, introduction by Aaron Scharf. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1970.