Bill Brandt is a founding
figure in photography’s modernist traditions, and this exhibition
represents a major critical reevaluation of his heralded career.
Brandt’s distinctive vision—his ability to present the mundane
world as fresh and strange—emerged in London in the 1930s, and drew
from his time in the Paris studio of Man Ray. His visual explorations
of the society, landscape, and literature of England are
indispensable to any understanding of photographic history and,
arguably, to our understanding of life in Britain during the middle
of the 20th century.
Brandt’s activity during
the Second World War, long distilled by Brandt and others to a
handful of now-iconic pictures of moonlit London during the Blackout
and improvised shelters during the Blitz, are presented here for the
first time in the context of his assignments for the leading
illustrated magazines of his day, establishing a key link between his
pre- and postwar work. Brandt’s crowning artistic achievement,
developed primarily between 1945 and 1961, is a series of nudes that
are both personal and universal, sensual and strange, collectively
exemplifying the “sense of wonder” that is paramount in his
photographs. Brandt’s work is unpredictable not only in the range
of his subjects but also in his printing style, which varied widely
throughout his career. This exhibition is the first to emphasize the
beauty of Brandt’s finest prints, and to trace the arc of their
evolution.