BRANDT, BILL

born May 1904, London, Eng. died Dec. 20, 1983, London byname of William Brandt photographer known principally for his documentation of 20th-century British life and for his unusual nudes. His photographs are generally characterized by strong contrastdeep, flat blacks and stark whites. Brandt worked in the Paris studio of the American artist and photographer Man Ray in 1929. In 1931 Brandt returned to England and became a free-lance photojournalist. He made a series of photographs that were published as The English at Home (1936). Many of these photographs reveal the influence of the French photographers Eugne Atget, Brassa, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Brandt's debt to French photographers is also evident in his subsequent collection, Londres de nuit (1938; London at Night). In 1937 Brandt began to photograph the industrial cities and the coal-mining districts of northern England, his photographs revealing the desperation of England's industrial workers during the 1930s. When World War II began, Brandt became a staff photographer for the British Home Office, photographing home-front scenes such as Londoners crowded into air-raid shelters in the city's underground stations. He also made such photographs as St. Paul's Cathedral in the Moonlight (1942), revealing the ghostly beauty of London's deserted streets during the blackouts. After the war Brandt photographed a series of landscapes associated with English literature, published as Literary Britain (1951). The landscapes and portraits that followed were increasingly nonnaturalistic. His experiments culminated in his best-known collection, Perspective of Nudes (1961). In several of these photographs he used the distortion produced at close range by his extremely wide-angle fixed-focus camera to transform the human body into abstract designs. In other photographs, however, the distorted human form becomes an integral element of a stark landscape of cliffs and rocky beach. He also published two collections of his work, Shadow of Light (1966; rev. ed., 1977) and Bill Brandt Nudes: 19451980 (1980).