Customer Reviews

Bill Brandt: Photographs 1928-1983

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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.