Does this text contain inaccurate information or language that you feel we should improve or change? We would like to hear from you. The V&A explains that "During the World Wars, suspended social life, long railway journeys and the need to reaffirm ideas of national identity all encouraged a return to the literary classics. Brandt shared in this. He read and admired the writings of the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy, George Crabbe and John Clare, some of whose poems he knew by heart. From 1945 onwards Brandt contributed a series of landscape photographs, accompanied by texts selected from British writers, to Lilliput, a British monthly magazine, founded by the photojournalist Stefan Lorant that focused on short stories, humour, photography and art. Other landscapes appeared in Picture Post and the American magazine Harper's Bazaar". Lilliput also took the "daring" decision to publish some of Brandt's early nudes. Brandt often used the darkroom to alter his photographs in decisive ways, using the 'day for night' technique employed by cinematographers to transform images photographed in daylight into night scenes.

When Citizen Kane was first shown, I’d never seen a film in which real rooms were used and you could see everything, the ceiling, and terrific perspective, it was all there. It was quite revolutionary, Citizen Kane, and I was very much inspired by it and I thought: ‘I must take photographs like that. Bill Brandt

Bill Brandt | Photographer | Blue Plaques | English Heritage". english-heritage.org.uk . Retrieved 23 July 2022. For] whatever the reason, the poetic trend of photography, which had already excited me in my early Paris days, began to fascinate me again. it seemed to me that there were wide fields still unexplored. I began to photograph nudes, portraits, and landscapes. Bill Brandt Brandt spent his remaining years reissuing his work in a series of books and teaching photography at the Royal College of Art. Brandt spent the next three years traveling (with his camera) around Europe, visiting the Hungarian steppe, Hamburg, Madrid, and Barcelona. In 1932, he married Eva Boros (the first of three wives), whom he had first met at Kollinger's studio. The couple set up home in the north London area of Belsize Park. In 1934, the Paris-based Surrealist magazine Minotaure published one of Brandt's early images, but England was to provide the inspiration for his most famous photographs. Around this time Brandt was also experimenting with montage techniques that combined portions of two or more negatives in one print. One of his best-known examples was an image called Early Morning on the River (1935). It features a seagull in flight that was superimposed onto a shot of a foggy River Thames. (Later, Brandt added a morning sun to the scene for a commissioned magazine feature.)

Knoblauch, Loring (6 May 2013). "Bill Brandt, Early Prints from the Collection of the Family @Edwynn Houk". Collector Daily . Retrieved 8 August 2020. Bill Brandt enjoyed working in the darkroom and liked to experiment, making many prints of the same negative.In this charismatic portrait of one of Britain's premier figurative painters, Francis Bacon stands, visible from the waist-up, at the bottom-left quarter of the image. His brow furrowed, Bacon looks downward, past the camera to the left. Behind him, an expansive grassy park is visible, dotted with autumnal trees. The twilight sky is cloudy and moody, and a tall, illuminated streetlight stands behind Bacon, just to the left of a footpath visible on the right edge of the photo.

His books, which include A Night in London(1938), Camera in London(1948) and Perspective of Nudes (1961) are among the most influential photo books of the period.He began experimenting with nude photography in the late 1930s, although he didn’t publish any of these photos until 1961 with the release of his book Perspective of Nudes. Cyril Connolly published Brandt's shelter photographs in Horizon in February 1942. In 1966 Connolly wrote that '"Elephant and Castle 3.45 a.m." eternalises for me the dreamlike monotony of wartime London.' Brandt himself recalled 'the long alley of intermingled bodies, with the hot, smelly air and continual murmur of snores'. 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.' In 1984, Bill Brandt was posthumously inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum. [5] Blue plaque, 4 Airlie Gardens 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.

Actor. Awarded Evening Standard Best Actor of the Year for Inadmissible Evidence, 1965, and Plaza Suite, 1969 For his photojournalism and portrait work, Brandt used a Rolleiflex. From the 1950s, he used a Hasselblad with a Zeiss Biogon 38mm super wide-angle lens for his landscape and nude photography. Brandt’s collages and color photographs were exhibited in London in the mid-1970s, and again ten years after his death in 1992.In the immediate post-war years Brandt showed his willingness to evolve by turning to more creative works. By now Brandt was experimenting with an extremely wide-angle lens (originally designed for industry) which lent his landscapes, most evident in his iconic image of the prehistoric Stonehenge monument, a vast impression of space and depth. His experimentations with the same lens on close shots of the human body, meanwhile, brought his nudes a uniquely distorted, or abstract, quality. Brandt’s photographs of the nude are a significant part of his output from the 1940s onwards; he combined composition and technique to create psychologically haunting and formally inventive studies. Works such as Nude, Campden Hill, London 1957 (Tate P14999), Nude, Campden Hill, London, c.1956 1956 (Tate P15000), Nude, London, 1958 1958 (Tate P15001), Nude, Belgravia, London, 1953 1953 (Tate P15004), Nude, Campden Hill, London, 1955 1955 (Tate P15007), Nude, St. John’s Wood, London, 1955 1955 (Tate P14997) and Nude, London, 1950, March 1950 (Tate P15008) were shot not in studios but in rooms of Brandt’s choosing, so that he could go beyond the basic elements of form and light. In Bill Brandt: A Life, Paul Delany explained: Elizabeth Bowen, one of Brandt’s favourite writers, wrote in her story 'Mysterious Kôr': 'Full moon drenched the city and searched it; there was not a niche left to stand in. The effect was remorseless: London looked like the moon's capital – shallow, cratered, extinct…And the moon did more: it exonerated and beautified'. Artist. From the 1960s has developed precisely patterned works which achieve retinal effect characteristic of Op Art.