Seaford, East Sussex Coast

Bill Brandt

1957 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

Bill Brandt is known for his photographs of London society (high and low) and for his documentation of the improvised air-raid shelters in the London Underground during Germany’s intense bombing campaign known as the Blitz (1940–41). After World War II, perhaps to cleanse his eye, he embarked on an innovative series of nudes using an out-of-date wooden view camera with a wide-angle lens and no shutter. The novelist Lawrence Durrell described the photographs in 1961 as "a prolonged mediation on the mystery of forms." Brandt’s intention was to see with an altered perspective the world then just beginning its own recovery. He hoped the awkward camera designed by Kodak for making close-up pictures of crime scenes might allow him to see "perhaps, like a mouse, a fish or a fly."

Artist

Bill Brandt

Date

1957

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, and The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1986