Bill Brandt, shadow as material
« German-born British photographer (1904-1983), portraitist, landscapist and explorer of the distorted nude. »
Born in Hamburg, trained in Vienna and Paris where he was briefly Man Ray's assistant, Bill Brandt settled in England in 1934. The English at Home (1936) and A Night in London (1938) made him the visual chronicler of a class society: aristocracy served champagne, miners blackened in the family bath.
During the Blitz, he photographed for the Ministry of Information Londoners sleeping in the Tube and in cellars. After the war he shifted to haunted, foggy landscape on the edge of the fantastic: Top Withens, the Brontë moors. His extreme contrast — black skies, burnt-out whites — became his signature.
His nude series, Perspective of Nudes (1961), used a wide-angle 9x12 view camera to distort bodies into living sculptures. Brandt died in London in 1983 after a life in which every image betrays the displaced gaze of the foreigner on England — he never quite got over it, and that was the gift.