Bill Brandt: Portraits

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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 Brandt’s work was published in magazines domestically and abroad including Lilliput, Picture Post and Harper’s Bazaar. Bill Brandt | Photographer | Blue Plaques | English Heritage". english-heritage.org.uk . Retrieved 23 July 2022. In this charismatic portrait of one of Britain's premier figurative painters, Francis Bacon stands, visible from the waist-up, at the bottom-left quarter of the image. His brow furrowed, Bacon looks downward, past the camera to the left. Behind him, an expansive grassy park is visible, dotted with autumnal trees. The twilight sky is cloudy and moody, and a tall, illuminated streetlight stands behind Bacon, just to the left of a footpath visible on the right edge of the photo.

Artist. From the 1960s has developed precisely patterned works which achieve retinal effect characteristic of Op Art. He began experimenting with nude photography in the late 1930s, although he didn’t publish any of these photos until 1961 with the release of his book Perspective of Nudes. Brandt's first one-man show in the United States was at Eastman House in Rochester, New York, in 1963, and was followed by a full retrospective at MoMA, New York, in 1969. MoMA introduced him in its catalogue as "the artist who defined the potential of photographic modernism in England for much of the twentieth century". In his last years, Brandt's output was however largely restricted to commissioned portraits and a teaching post at London's Royal College of Art (which had awarded him an honorary doctorate). Brandt (like Moore) had also experimented with assemblages formed of found objects. These were published in 1993 as Bill Brandt: The Assemblages. 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. In the 1920s he went off to Paris to study with Man Ray. Years later, Brandt credited the surrealist photographer with broadening his skills. More importantly, Ray inspired in him a new excitement about photography and the world. Man Ray appreciated young Brandt’s darkroom expertisem but at the time didn’t think much of his photography. He would later reassess his opinion and credit Brandt with infusing English photography with elements of surrealism and the avant-garde.In 1940, Brandt was commissioned by the government’s Ministry of Information to report on Londoners seeking refuge in underground air-raid shelters.

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.Using the fixed-focus camera with a wide-angle lens, allowed him to create heavily distorted images and “see like a mouse, a fish or a fly.”