BILL BRANDT
Bill Brandt was born in Hamburg, Germany on May 3rd, 1904, and died on December 20th, 1983. After growing up during World War I, and surviving tuberculosis, Brandt began to assist in Man Ray’s studio in 1930. In 1933 Brandt moved to London, and worked as a photojournalist from the mid 1930s until the mid 1950s. His work was published in many different journals, including the surrealist magazine Minotaure.
To celebrate the end of World War II in 1945, which had been a major influence on his photography, Brandt began a series of nudes. These are the works I have chosen to focus on while emulating Brandt. Brandt found a seventy-year-old wooden Kodak camera in an antique store, and used it for his nude pieces. It had no shutter, a wide-angle lens and an aperture the size of a pin. This camera caused the figures to distort, creating an illusion of space and a very steep perspective. Brandt wrote that “the lens produced anatomical images and shapes which my eyes had never observed.” He was influenced by Edward Weston’s journal writings, which proclaimed “the camera sees more than the eye, so why not make use of it?” Brandt took no issue with editing the composition of his pieces in the dark room, and took advantage of the ability to crop images using an enlarger. His nudes have a surreal quality to them, as women become anonymous and faceless, their bodies becoming ambiguous, often truncated landscapes.
