Bill Brandt
Bill Brandt was a photographer who is said to have been one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. Brandt was born in Hamburg on May 2nd 1904, his father was English and his mother German. However, later in life he begun to say that he was born in south London. This was due to him suffering the traumas of World War I as a child in Germany, having been bullied at school and the rise in Nazism. Brandt suffered from Tuberculosis for a long period of time which led to him travelling to Vienna between the ages of 16 and 22. It was while in Vienna visiting his lung specialist that he was cured and decided to start work in a photographic studio in the city. He was found the job by Dr Eugenie Schwarzwald who through her, is probably how he met the subject of his first major portrait; poet Ezra Pound. It was shortly after this that Pound suggested that Brandt should contact American photographer and surrealist artist Man Ray. This introduction was of great value to Brandt and strongly influenced his later works. He assisted Man Ray for three months in Paris, where he experienced Surrealist art and film during its prime. In 1937 Brandt visited the north of England where he photographed unemployed miners searching for coal and northern cities which were later published in the 1940s. Brandt’s early photographs experiment with angular modernist styles and night photography.
In 1932 he married Eva Boros and settled in Belsize Park, London. It was while living here that he made the photographs which were published in his first book, The English at Home. Brandt used his family contacts - for example, his banker uncles - to gain access to a variety of subjects. The book contained a number of pointed social contrasts, such as the high life presented on the front cover and a poor family shown on the back cover. His second book A Night in London, was published in 1938 in London and Paris. It tells a story of a London night, portraying different social classes and again making use of his family and friends.
Brandt is known well for his experiments with night photography, this was a new genre of the period which was opened up by the development of the flashbulb, however Brandt preferred to use portable tungsten photo-flood lamps. He often used the dark room to alter his photographs, for example the photograph Policeman in a Dockland Alley he used the ‘day for night’ technique used by cinematographers to transform images photographed in daylight into night-time scenes.