Bill Brandt

Bill Brandt – Successful debut as freelance photojournalist in London

Bill Brandt was born Hermann Wilhelm Brandt in Hamburg on 3 May 1904. He was mostly called Bill even as a child and later chose this nickname as his artist’s name. The second son of the British merchant Louis Brandt - who himself came from the German-Russian family von Oesterriech – Bill Brandt grew up with his two brothers in sheltered circumstances. Following school in Germany, his delicate constitution necessitated convalescence in a Swiss sanatorium, and it was here that he finally arrived at photography. Once he had recovered, he travelled through Vienna to Paris where, mediated by the poet Ezra Pound, he worked for a short time in the Parisian studio of the world-famous American photo artist Man Ray and came in contact with his surrealist circle. Brandt subsequently moved on to London where his family had fled due to the looming Nazi rule. 

Photographic documentation with artistic value

Bill Brandt worked in London as a freelance photojournalist and attracted attention with a documentary picture series about the everyday life of all classes of English society during the global economic crisis. Many of the pictures, published in 1936 under the name The English at Home, displayed the influence of Eugène Atget, Brassaï and Henri Cartier-Bresson. A further photo project in a similar style with the title A Night in London followed in 1938. Brandt quickly drew attention with his unique manner of photo documentation and was soon a regular contributor to journals such as Harper’s Bazaar, Liliput and Picture Post. In the late 1930s, he travelled through North England and unsparingly documented the working and living conditions of the working class there. During the Second World War he was commissioned by the British Home Secretary to capture photographic impressions of the air-raid shelters of the London underground. Ghostly fascination lent itself to the photographs Brandt took of London’s deserted streets during the blackout and the 1942 shot of St. Paul’s Cathedral in the Moonlight was particularly popular. 

Patient search for the desired picture

Already during his early documentary work, Bill Brandt chose unique perspectives for his pictures and distinguished himself with a characteristic play with light and shadow, and on the encouragement of his friend Brassai, worked extensively on night photography. After the war, he ceased working as a photojournalist and concentrated completely on art photography. Alongside landscape and portrait photography, he studied especially the female nude, for which he found an original and distinctive approach: The enlarged cutouts, as presented in his photo series Distorsions, reminiscent more of geometric forms that the human body. In doing so, the artist never photographed spontaneously, but prepared his shots meticulously, ever patient, searching for the best perspective for his pictures. For landscape shots, he sometimes spent months waiting for the right time of year, the right weather and the right light quality.

Bill Brandt died in London on 20 December 1983.