Distorted, sensual nudes, gritty underground bomb shelters and surreal, barren landscapes all make up the iconic images of British photographer Bill Brandt whose retrospective work will be on display at the Bermuda National Gallery from Monday.
The eclectic photographer, whose career spanned over 50 years, can be drawn together by a darkness and melancholy that was so prevalent in his character according to lecturer and art critic Ian Jeffery who worked closely alongside Mr. Brandt during the latter years of his life.
Bill Brandt: A Retrospective will display 155 gelatin silver prints from his London archive while Mr. Jeffery will be in Bermuda giving lectures on the life and times of the late Mr. Brandt; one of the greatest British photographers of our time.
Born in Hamburg in 1904 to an English father and German mother Mr. Brandt was keen to deny his German heritage not least due to school-day bullying and the Nazi uprising. He was influenced by the photographers in Berlin in the 1920s and early 30s and eventually took that style to London. His main influence was Brassai who was a Romanian who lived in Paris. From 1920 Mr. Brandt spent a long spell in a Swiss sanatorium being treated for tuberculosis. It is thought that here he took up amateur photography before moving to Vienna.
With plenty of time to read newspapers he was influenced by lesser known German photographers such as Kurt Hutton and Felix Mann who published in the German Illustrated Press.
Speaking to the Bermuda Sun Mr. Jeffery described how Mr. Brandt's days in the sanatorium in Switzerland coloured his work and the character behind the lens.
"It's a typical story of that time because people had long periods of convalescence," explained Mr. Jeffery.
"He gained a taste for darkness, for very deep shadows, twilight photography and the idea of the back streets of the city as a place filled with secrets.
"He would have seen things like Fritz Lang's Metropolis. He liked the idea of criminals stalking the streets and also had psychoanalysis in Vienna so he was very conscious of the unconscious as a breeding ground for stories. He was someone who lived in the past and had a secret, imaginative world in which he dwelled."
Secrecy and mystery were prevalent traits in Mr. Brandt which Mr. Jeffery believes originates from his life as an outsider. German was his native language and he was very wary of speaking English and he didn't give much away.
"He was mild and laconic. He was probably trained to that because he was brought up in Germany with English antecedents and then he came to England and was always something of an outsider. He had more peculiarities than any other major photographer. There were many other oddball photographers in the early '70s including a great American photographer called Gary Winogrand. Their work was very psychologically based they weren't interested so much in society as their own take on it and their own predicament. That's what sets him apart. A lot of photographers were outer directed and did what other people wanted but he always did what he wanted."
In 1929 Mr. Brandt was taken in as an assistant by the legendary avant-garde photographer Man Ray when Paris was the center of the world for the surrealist movement. The following year he moved to London where he published his first book The English at Home, while working for Lilliput and the Picture Post. He focussed on stark social contrasts and later published A Night in London. After the second world war Mr. Brandt ditched his documentary-style photography and produced some of his most innovative images mainly surreal nudes of women distorted with an ultra-wide view lens. The work demonstrated Mr. Brandt's deep understanding of the Ecole de Paris such as Man Ray, Picasso and Matisse. In 1961 he published Perspectives of Nudes featuring women in domestic and studio settings as well as on the beaches of East Sussex and Northern France. In his final years he took portrait commissions and taught photography at Royal College of Art and in 1975 he showed at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1975. He died while working on another show the Bill Brandt's Literary Britain in 1976.
Mr. Brandt's work will be accompanied by The History of Bermuda drawing on artwork from the BNG's permanent collection of Bermudian photographers.
