Bill Brandt

By: Chloe Stevens

Background
● Born in Hamburg, Germany in 1904
● Took up photography in Switzerland
● Assisted Man Ray (artist and photographer) in his studio in
Paris
● Worked as a photojournalist for Lilliput and Picture Post
Work
● Photographed industrial cities and coal-mining districts of
northern England in the late 1930s
○ Revealed what industrial workers had to go through
● Photographed during World War II
○ Took pictures of London’s home-front: the suburbs and
slums
○ Documented class differences in England during the
Depression
● Created books of Documentary, Landscape and Nude
pictures
Parlourmaid and
Under-parlourmaid Ready to
Serve Dinner, 1938 West Ham Bedroom, London
Woman in Hamburg, St. Pauli
District, 1933
Quotes
About London

'I photographed pubs, common lodging houses at night, theatres, Turkish baths,
prisons and people in their bedrooms. London has changed so much that some of
these pictures now have a period charm almost of another century.'

About Landscapes

'When I have found a landscape which I want to photograph, I wait for the right
season, the right weather, and the right time of day or night, to get the picture
which I know to be there.'
Methods
Nude Photography
● A Kodak camera- no shutter, wide-angle lens as small as a pinhole
● Camera very close to the body
● These contributed to a distortion of the body and made abstract designs of the body
● Also, integrated the human body into landscape of cliffs and rocky beach
Photographs in London
● Night photography- used portable tungsten lamps
● Used the darkroom to develop his photographs with a technique called “day for
night”- transformed images taken in the daylight into night scenes
● Created montages: combining pieces of two negatives into one print
Portraits
● In the 1960s he used a Hasselblad with a superwide-angle lens
○ Made his images dynamic and edgier looking
○ Used his family and friends to act out social roles
 Night scene: Policeman in a
Nude Photography
Dockland Alley, 1938
Exposure: Francis Bacon
Bill Brandt with a Kodak

Early Morning on the River,

Street Scene or Couple in London Bridge, 1935
Peckham, 1936 Montage: seagull, Thames River
Hasselblad in the fog, added morning sun
Interests
● Working in the darkroom
● Liked to experiment in the darkroom by printing the same
shot in several different ways
○ ‘It takes a long time to produce a good print.’
○ ‘Only the photographer himself knows the effect he
wants.’
● Developing work based on his ideas on expressionism and
surrealism
Imitation Photo
Photo in the liking of Bill Brandt
Resources
http://spartacus-educational.com/USAPbrandt.htm

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bill-Brandt

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/b/bill-brandt-biography/

https://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/12/bill-brandt-bill-brandt-personal-v
iew.html

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/b/working-methods-bill-brandt/