Bill Brandt (né Hermann Wilhelm Brandt) was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1904. After working as an apprentice to the surrealist photographer Man Ray in Paris, he moved to London, where he enjoyed a long and successful career as one of Britain's foremost photographers, best known for his social documentary of British life in the 1930s and 1940s, high-contrast, distorted nudes and landscapes.
Photographer Bill Brandt (né Hermann Wilhelm Brandt) was born to a German mother and British father in Hamburg, Germany in 1904. He would later disown his German background and claim to have been born in south London. He contracted tuberculosis as a teenager and his parents sent him to sanatoria in Agra and Davos (both in Switzerland), where he spent the next four years. His convalescence gave him time to nurture what would be a lifelong interest in literature and the visual arts and he spent most of his time reading, watching films and experimenting with his camera. In 1927, Brandt travelled to Vienna hoping to have his tuberculosis cured by psychotherapy. It was there that he met the intellectual, philanthropist and pedagogue Dr Eugenie Schwarzwald, who suggested that he pursue a career in photography. Brandt took her advice and secured an apprenticeship with Austrian photographer Grete Kolliner. In 1930 he moved to Paris with his future wife Eva Boros and worked as an informal apprentice to renowned American surrealist photographer and artist, Man Ray, in whose studio he experimented with printing techniques and developed the surrealist penchant for ‘the uncanny aspects of the everyday’ that would permeate his photographic style (Meister, 2013).
Brandt had always wanted to be English and in April 1934, he and his wife immigrated to England, settling in Belsize Park, north London. In February 1936, less than two years later, he published his first photobook, The English At Home, 'a pictorial survey of sorts, moving across the social classes, and between rural life and the urban city' (Campany, 2006). That same year, Brandt was offered work as a photojournalist by Tom Hopkinson, assistant editor of Weekly Illustrated. Inspired by his reading of George Orwell and J. B. Priestley, in 1937 he travelled to the north of England to document the impact of the Great Depression on communities dependent on heavy industry and coal mining including Jarrow, a Tyneside town that had suffered mass unemployment after the closure of its shipbuilding yard. The photographs were not published at the time, perhaps providing too bleak a commentary on the living conditions of the working poor and the unemployed. One image found its first news outlet in a 1943 Picture Post article advocating for the welfare recommendations of the Beveridge Report. It was captioned as one of the 'signs of want with which we were all too familiar in the years between the wars' (Droth et. al., 2020). The majority of Brandt's photographs at this time, however, were taken in London and, in 1938, the publication of his second photobook, A Night in London ‘cemented his artistic alliance with the city’ (Meister, 2013). Heavily influenced by Brassaï’s Paris de nuit, which had received huge popular and critical acclaim when it was published in Paris in 1933, A Night in London appears to document the routines of various social classes, and yet many of the photographs included are in fact staged and feature Brandt’s friends and family members.
In the next decade, Brandt entered his most intensive period of work for the illustrated press. He completed a number of assignments for Lilliput and Picture Post (both founded by the visionary publisher Stefan Lorant and subsequently edited by Hopkinson), as well as for Harper’s Bazaar. In September 1940, the Ministry of Information commissioned Brandt and prominent British artist Henry Moore to document the London Underground shelters where, by November of that year, approximately 200,000 people were regularly taking refuge. In addition to being published in Lilliput, Brandt’s photographs were sent to Washington as part of the British government’s attempt to persuade the USA to support the Allies in the war.
At the end of the war Brandt gradually moved away from photojournalism. He later reflected, 'I have often been asked why this happened. I think I lost my enthusiasm for reportage. Documentary photography had become fashionable. Everybody was doing it. Besides, my main theme had disappeared; England was no longer a country of marked social contrast. 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, British Council). From 1945 onwards, he contributed a series of landscape photographs to Lilliput which were accompanied by selected texts by British writers including Emily Brönte and Charles Dickens. He also began working as a portrait photographer and, over the next few decades, his portraits of cultural, artistic and literary figures were published in Harper’s Bazaar, where his second wife Marjorie Beckett worked as a fashion editor. Brandt's subjects included British artists Barbara Hepworth and Francis Bacon, as well as Alberto Giacometti and Max Ernst. Able to pose subjects, use artificial light, manipulate the image in the dark room and retouch the final print to produce a powerful and lasting image. He stated that 'I am not interested in rules and conventions. Photography is not a sport. If I think a picture will look better brilliantly lit, I use lights, or even flash. It is the results that count, no matter how it was achieved. I find the dark room work most important, as I can finish the composition of a picture only under an enlarger. I do not understand why this is supposed to interfere with the truth. Photographers should follow their own judgements and not the fads and dictates of others' (Bill Brandt, British Council).
A series of female nudes taken between 1945 and 1961 are often considered to be Brandt’s ‘crowning artistic achievement’. Heavily influenced by the nudes of Henry Moore as well as of Picasso and Man Ray, the earlier works were taken in interiors and studios using a Kodak camera with a wide-angle lens (manufactured in 1931 it was originally used for crime scene records), while the later works were taken on beaches in East Sussex and in northern and southern France using a Superwide Hasselblad camera. In the late 1960s, Brandt created collages with found materials and natural objects, often assembled from marine flora and fauna and arranged them on boards painted in marine colours. Some were set up temporarily as still lifes for the camera while others, including Monsoon Drive (1969), were fixed in place and framed in plexiglass boxes to be hung on the wall. Brandt exhibited his sculptural collages in London at Kinsmans Gallery in 1974 and at Marlborough Gallery in 1976, in both cases alongside photographs of more typical subjects, such as his portraits and nudes. In 1993, a number of the collages were published in Bill Brandt: The Assemblages, which juxtaposed posthumous colour photographs and black and white prints.
Brandt spent the last few years of his life reissuing his work in a series of books published by Gordon Fraser including Bill Brandt: Nudes 1945–1980 (1980), Bill Brandt: Portraits (1982) and London in the Thirties: Bill Brandt (1983) as well as teaching photography at the Royal College of Art. Bill Brandt died in London on 20 December 1983. Since then, his work has been the subject of major retrospectives in the UK and abroad including Bill Brandt: Portraits 1982 at the National Portrait Gallery and Bill Brandt: A Centenary Retrospective and Other Sides of Bill Brandt at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2004 and Bill Brandt / Henry Moore at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2020. His work is held in a number of public collections in the UK, including the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Portrait Gallery and the Tate in London.
Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Bill Brandt]
Publications related to [Bill Brandt] in the Ben Uri Library