Bill Brandt: Portraits

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To celebrate the centenary of his birth, this display is the first chance in twenty years to see a remarkable collection of great photographic portraits by legendary photographer Bill Brandt (1904 - 1983). This display complements the major exhibition being mounted by the Victoria and Albert Museum - Bill Brandt: A Centenary Retrospective (24 March -25 July 2004). Haworth-Booth, Mark introduction and essay by David Mellor. Bill Brandt: Behind the Camera. Photographs, 1928-1983. Oxford: Phaidon, 1985.

Although he photographed on occasion for the News Chronicle and Weekly Illustrated, Brandt was not in demand as a photojournalist until the foundation (by the great picture-editor Stefan Lorant) of Lilliput (1937) and Picture Post (1938). The majority of Brandt's earliest English photographs were first published in Brandt’s The English at Home (1936). Editor note: If you enjoy our Bill Brandt article and find it helpful, then we would be grateful if you could share it with other photographers through your own blog, social media and forums.To light the scenes, he either used street lights or transportable tungsten lights (also known as photo floods). His later work was more experimental, and he drew heavily on his interest in surrealism art, and the influence of Man Ray’s work in the 1920s.

His photos were more experimental and characterized by a mysterious and brooding quality that provided a fresh look on some of the most common genres: portraiture, landscape and the nude.He wasn’t one for mass production. Each print was an original, printed and finished by Brandt with utmost care. I had the good fortune to start my career in Paris in 1929. 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 recognized the possibilities of photography. Bill Brandt Although Brandt’s images can appear candid and spontaneous, he did not capture people unaware. He worked closely with those he photographed, directing and lighting them to cast ‘the spell that charges the commonplace with beauty’. He sometimes waited for hours to capture effects at specific times of day – as in Woman Swimming – and some of his most mysterious scenes were taken at night. Brandt developed his own film and printed his own photographs, giving him further opportunities to rebalance light and dark, and change the composition through cropping and enlarging. He even used ink and pencil to alter prints, for example introducing plumes of smoke onto Hail, Hell & Halifax. The series of Brandt’s nudes shown in the exhibition include some of his best-known and most evocative works, which further explore his interest in altered perspectives, surreal effects and abstract compositions. With camera in hand, he took in the city with the sharpness of an outsider, producing two books that were careful studies of English life: The English at Home (1936) and A Night in London (1938). His photographs offered an inventory of British types—bobbies, tailors, homemakers, miners, chambermaids, schoolchildren, shopkeepers—and preserved the world of 1930s England that was disappearing forever.

To celebrate the centenary of his birth, this display was the first chance in twenty years to see a remarkable collection of great photographic portraits by legendary photographer Bill Brandt (1904 - 1983). This display complemented the major exhibition being mounted by the Victoria and Albert Museum - Bill Brandt: A Centenary Retrospective (24 March -25 July 2004). 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.'

His books, which include A Night in London(1938), Camera in London(1948) and Perspective of Nudes (1961) are among the most influential photo books of the period. Bill Brandt: A Retrospective Exhibition. Catalogue, introduction by David Mellor. Bath: Royal Photographic Society/National Centre of Photography, 1981. Please note: sitters’ biographical dates have been updated from the original hand list. Updated December 2012). His early work featured naked models in domestic interiors and on the beaches of East Sussex and northern and southern France. While his later, more experimental and abstract nude work, was shot mainly in the Mediterranean. Portrait Photography