London

Bill Brandt

1953 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

Born to a prosperous mercantile family in Hamburg and educated in Europe, Brandt absorbed the lessons of the Surrealists while perfecting his photographic technique in Man Ray’s studio in Paris in 1929. He then settled in London, where, like his contemporaries André Kertész, Brassaï, and Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, he made his name in the 1930s with photographs that pretended to objective reportage. His constant search for more expressive and poetic subjects brought him to the realization that his richest storehouse of imagery was not the external world but the mysterious chambers of his own imagination. In the psychologically haunting and formally inventive portraits and nudes of the next fifteen years, the photographer explored his private fantasies through the distorting lens of a wide-angle camera.

Artist

Bill Brandt

Date

1953

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