Bill Brandt: Portraits

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Brandt, who emerged as the outstanding chronicler in pictures of the English working classes in the inter wars years, made his first visit to northern England in the summer of 1937 where he encountered first-hand the financial hardship of communities crippled by 80 percent unemployment following the closure of local mills and collieries. In one of his most famous, and most poignant, photographs of the series, Coal-searcher Going Home to Jarrow, Brandt documented the act of "coal-searching" whereby his subject, pictured by Brandt pushing his heavily laden bicycle up a steep path, had foraged on local slag heaps for small lumps of coal with which he might use to heat his home. Images such as this, which is rendered in a sharp wintry high contrast of light and dark tones, were complemented with more claustrophobic scenes of cramped interior living conditions. This image was not published, however, until 1947 when Picture Post presented it as a visual contrast to the age of austerity and rationing that had followed in Britain in the immediate war years. Bill Brandt: Nudes 1945–1980. Introduction by Michael Hiley. London and Bedford: G. Fraser/Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1980. ISBN 9780860920519/ISBN 9780821210970.

Brandt’s documentary work occurred at the same time as the rise of the picture press in England and as a result, his photo series became synonymous with British life between wars. 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. In that catalog, in the chapter about portraiture, Brandt himself is quoted as having said: "The photographer has to wait until something between dreaming and action occurs in the expression of the face."

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Bill Brandt met Tom Hopkinson, then assistant editor of Weekly Illustrated, in 1936. Hopkinson, later knighted for services to journalism, became Brandt's editor at Lilliput and Picture Post. He described Brandt in a profile published in Lilliput in 1942 as having 'a voice as loud as a moth and the gentlest manner to be found outside a nunnery'. Brandt would propose picture-stories for both magazines and often sequence his photo-essays, sometimes also contributing text. Supporter of the Liberal Party and the League of Nations. A governor of the BBC. Published Harper’s Bazaar, N.Y., July 1945

Bill Brandt is regarded as one of the most important photographers of the 20th century. He is best known for his surrealist influenced nudes and his photos of London during the Blitz. 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. Brandt's last years were spent reissuing his work in a series of books published by Gordon Fraser. He taught Royal College of Art photography students and continued to accept commissions for portraits. He selected an exhibition for the Victoria and Albert Museum titled ‘The Land: 20th Century Landscape Photographs’ (1975) and was working on another show, 'Bill Brandt’s Literary Britain', when he died after a short illness in 1983.After the London Blitz began, Brandt was commissioned to record bomb shelters by the Ministry of Information. His photographs were sent to Washington as part of the British government's attempt to bring the US into the war on the allied side. 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 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.