Bill Brandt: Portraits

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He decided to pursue a career in photojournalism, a profession still in its infancy. However, Brandt was a photojournalist with a difference. For under the tutelage of Man Ray, Brandt had developed his own moody, surreal style. In 1940, Brandt was commissioned by the government’s Ministry of Information to report on Londoners seeking refuge in underground air-raid shelters. After being sent to Vienna for lung analysis in 1927 he met the Austrian writer, Dr. Eugenie Schwarzwald. She suggested that he should pursue a career in photography. Photography Career Bill Brandt: A Retrospective Exhibition. Catalogue, introduction by David Mellor. Bath: Royal Photographic Society/National Centre of Photography, 1981.

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. Bill Brandt: Portraits. Introduction by Alan Ross. London: G. Fraser/Austin: University of Texas Press, 1982. Using the fixed-focus camera with a wide-angle lens, allowed him to create heavily distorted images and “see like a mouse, a fish or a fly.” To celebrate the centenary of his birth, this display is the first chance in twenty years to see a remarkable collection of great photographic portraits by legendary photographer Bill Brandt (1904 - 1983). This display complements the major exhibition being mounted by the Victoria and Albert Museum - Bill Brandt: A Centenary Retrospective (24 March -25 July 2004).

The Photography Show Presented by AIPAD 2022

Supporter of the Liberal Party and the League of Nations. A governor of the BBC. Published Harper’s Bazaar, N.Y., July 1945 Hermann Wilhelm Brandt, born into an Anglo-German family in Hamburg, was a schoolboy in Germany during the First World War and learnt photography in a Viennese studio in the 1920s. He also spent a brief time with Man Ray in Paris before settling in London in the 1930s. Taking hard-edged documentary photographs during the Depression for Picture Post and Weekly Illustrated helped establish his reputation, as did his first books The English at Home (1936) and A Night in London (1938). The former contains his classic pictures of a day in the life of a domestic servant, published in Picture Post and recently included in the Gallery's Below Stairs exhibition. It is the result that counts, no matter how it was achieved. I find the darkroom work most important, as I can finish the composition of a picture only under the enlarger. I do not understand why this is supposed to interfere with the truth. Photographers should follow their own judgment, and not the fads and dictates of others. Bill Brandt The Print Bill Brandt: Photographs. Exhibition catalogue, introduction by Aaron Scharf. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1970. Jay, Bill and Nigel Warburton. Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt. London: Thames and Hudson, 1999.

Brandt, Bill with introductions by Cyril Connolly and Mark Haworth-Booth. Shadow of Light, revised and extended edition. London: Gordon Fraser, 1977, pl.101. Brandt’s collages and color photographs were exhibited in London in the mid-1970s, and again ten years after his death in 1992. In 2003 the V&A acquired two albums containing some 400 photographs, mainly by Bill Brandt. The albums were compiled in the years 1928-39 by his first wife Eva Boros. They illustrate Brandt's early photographic experiments as he travelled with Eva from Vienna to Hungary, Hamburg, Paris, Barcelona and Madrid before finally settling in London in 1934.

Bill Brandt & John Davies

Martin Gasser, "Bill Brandt in Switzerland and Austria: Shadows of Life". In: History of Photography, Winter 1997. Over the next 40 years, he took portraits of writers, actors, musicians and painters for Lilliput, Harper’s Bazaar and Picture Post.