Bill Brandt. Perspective of Nudes (with a preface by Lawrence Durrell and an introduction by Chapman Mortimer), 1961 (illustrated full page plate 3). Michael Hiley, Bill Brandt:Nudes 1945-80, Gordon Fraser, London, 1980 (illustrated full page pl.4) Bill Brandt, Shadow of Light, 1977 (illustrated p.122) Brandt Nudes. A New Perspective (with a commentary by Mark Haworth-Booth), 2004 (illustrated full page p.12)
Photographer's credit stamp (verso) Bill Brandt's nudes of the late 1940s tend to show the figure in a domestic setting. The use of a police camera led to distorted views...
Bill Brandt's nudes of the late 1940s tend to show the figure in a domestic setting. The use of a police camera led to distorted views that elongated the models limbs and allowed an extraordinary depth of field. Later nudes would abstract even further and remove all traces of the model's environment.
Bill Brandt's post war nudes emerge from a context that can be compared directly to near contemporary photographs of a prostitute bathing by Bert Hardy, also in the Hyman Collection. However, Brandt provides a more charged psychological resonance to apparently straightforward domestic scenes, so that the atmosphere goes beyond the intimate to the surreal, from the prosaic to the erotic.
Copyright The Bill Brandt Archive, London / Courtesy Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York / Zürich. 2018