Meet Bill Brandt, Photography Pioneer
Tuesday, May 13, 2008 @ 21:55
There are not too many photographers whose work has made them icons of their time. But, Bill Brandt is one of them, and he is generally considered to be one of the original great pioneers in the field of photography.
He is most famous for his work during the Second World War, when he was employed by the Home Office to create a photographic representation of the public use of the "tube" as an air raid shelter. Of course, the assignment was an effort at blatant propaganda as it was intended to show how well the public was coping with the ravages of war.
Brandt also was commissioned to document the famous architecture of London during the war. His employers wanted to ensure that the memory of many important buildings and landmarks would be preserved in the event they were destroyed in air raids.
Brandt was born in Hamburg, Germany in 1904. He was diagnosed with tuberculosis at a young age, and spent a considerable time in a Swiss hospital recovering from the disease. He began working in the field of photography from around 1929, when he started working on a variety of projects focused on the layers of British society at that time.
Brandt worked in several genres, and after the end of the war, he transitioned from documenting architecture and life during the war to creating highly distorted images of nudes, employing what was then a novel idea of a shutter-less camera.
Making another transition, he eventually moved away from his work with nudes to making portraits of some of the leading personalities of the contemporary art world. Among the best example of this era of his work is his rather striking portrait of Francis Bacon.
Brandt's work is featured in many books and offers an insight as to what goes into the mind of a true trailblazer in the field of art and photography.
