Bill Brandt: Photographs 1928-1983 [Paperback]

Ian Jeffrey (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1994

Bill Brandt's position as one of the greatest British photographers of the 20th century is incontestable. His name and achievement fit easily within the pantheon of international 'greats' of modern photography: Atget, Brassai, Kertdsz and Cartier-Bresson. Brandt's career began in 1920s Paris, when he was introduced by Ezra Pound to Man Ray, who took him on as an apprentice and who inspired the surrealistic vision characteristic of his early pictures. His first great work spanned a whole decade: an encyclopaedic study of the social conditions of Britain in the Thirties, culminating in two famous cycles, "The English at Home" (1936) and "A Night in London" (1938). In the Second World War and the years that followed Brandt expanded his range to include portraiture, landscape and nudes. Patiently delving after the uniqueness of every person or place - the sadness of Dylan Thomas, the bleakness of Wuthering Heights or the qualities of the female form - his vision conferred a timeless, mythic quality on both the notable and the ordinary. This retrospective review of Brandt's work, edited with an introduction by Ian Jeffrey, is published on the occasion of a major exhibition at the Barbican Art Gallery, London. Its six sections cover every aspect of his art, from the early sociological studies to the late nudes. Many celebrated images are included, but others have never been seen in book form before. Ian Jeffrey is the author of many books, including "Landscape" (1984) and "Photography: A Concise History" (1981), both published by Thames and Hudson.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

England's most interesting, most British photographer was German-born Bill Brandt. Widely traveled as a young man, Brandt resided in England after 1931, and the character of that country became his most constant theme. He pursued it through documentary work published first in magazines, then in such books as The English at Home (1936), A Night in London (1938), Camera in London (1948), and Literary Britain (1951). His nudes, produced later and published in Perspective of Nudes (1961), along with a group of landscapes of England, round out a body of work so dazzling and yet so puzzling that most interpreters fail to take it all into account. They emphasize either matters of social class and documentary photography or Brandt's powerful formal inventions (e.g., the starkness of contrast in his prints, using an antique wide-angle lens for the highly abstract nudes). Jeffrey suggests unifying artistic and psychoanalytic themes emerging from Brandt's childhood as subtexts in Brandt's documentary work (unfortunately, Jeffrey makes too many references to pictures not in the book). Gretchen Garner

Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson (April 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0500277265
• ISBN-13: 978-0500277263
• Product Dimensions: 10.9 x 8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,849,660 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Vivid, starkly beautiful chiaroscuro of "austerity" Britain., June 24, 1999

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The Sentinel (Vancouver, British Columbia Canada) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bill Brandt: Photographs 1928-1983 (Paperback)

Bill Brandt's work has a striking poetic immediacy and a potent suggestiveness of mood rarely seen in still photography. Sombre landscapes, brooding portraits of prominent literary figures, and surreal, distorted, abstract nudes are featured in this superb, nearly comprehensive volume of the great man's oeuvre.

Just a slight glance at some of these unforgettable pictures and the viewer is hypnotized--eyes rapt to the page--drawn into a strange, mysterious world of the past and overwhelmed by its melancholy lyricism. One senses a profound humanity in Brandt's treatment of desolation and poverty: a quality comparable to the best work of Expressionist painters like Munch or Schiele.

It is interesting to note that the visual sensibility found in Brandt's high contrast, black-and-white compositions and sometimes startling, baroque perspectives also bears comparison to the cascading, labyrinthine imagery of Orson Welles's films. And the influence of Brandt's work appears evident in a number of other dreamy/nightmarish films: e.g., Ingmar Bergman's "The Silence," Roman Polanski's "Repulsion," David Lynch's "Eraserhead" and "The Elephant Man," and Michael Radford's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," to name but a few.

To put it simply: Bill Brandt is a genius of the lens--a supreme master of light and shadow--and, without a doubt, one of the most vital and innovative artists of the twentieth century.