December 13, 2002

Brandt and Weston: Two Geniuses of Photography Exhibition opens in Milwaukee, Wisconsin USA

December 13, 2002 – February 9, 2003
Milwaukee Art Museum, WI

Bill Brandt: A Retrospective, curated by John-Paul Kernot, is organised by the Bill Brandt Archive and is circulated by Curatorial Assistance, Los Angeles, CA.

Only in Milwaukee will visitors see the exhibitions of works by two of the most respected photographers of the 20th century, on view side by side. Bill Brandt: A Retrospective and Edward Weston: Life Work are on view at the Milwaukee Art Museum December 13, 2002 – February 9, 2003. The exhibitions, made up largely of vintage prints, contain a full range of works by Bill Brandt and Edward Weston. Brandt and Weston: Two Geniuses of Photography traces the creative growth and stylistic changes of each artist, presenting their distinctive and innovative visions side by side.

Bill Brandt: A Retrospective explores the wide ranging work of this British master photographer. Brandt’s work is familiar to viewers because he is the inventor of his style – the trademark grainy gray British light evident in his photographs From Brandt’s early work that documents fixed social contrasts of pre-World War II life in Britain to his later experimentation with a surreal style, this exhibition spans 50 years of Brandt’s far reaching career in an extensive assemblage of 155 vintage gelatin silver prints from the Bill Brandt Archive in London.

Brandt’s vision, unconfined by easy categories, extends from photojournalism to moody, atmospheric landscapes to stark, revealing portraiture to high-contrast nudes, distorted with very wide-angle lenses.

“No other British photographer has made so many memorable photographs as Bill Brandt. He excelled in all fields – social scenes, Surrealism, night photography, wartime documentary, landscape, portraiture and the nude,” writes Mark Hayworth-Booth, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Through his work as Man Ray’s assistant in Paris in 1929 and as a freelancer for the Weekly Illustrated in London in the 1930’s, Bill Brandt (1904-1983) developed an expressive, high-key style that pushed accepted boundaries of documentary and journalism when photographing the destitute villages and mining towns of northern England. After World War II, Brandt’s work underwent a dramatic shift in focus. He left his documentary style behind and returned to his interests in the surreal. Brandt then turned to nudes, portraits and landscapes.

Today, Brandt’s formally plastic and haunting nude studies from this period are considered as some of his most innovative work. Brandt defined new territory showing among other things, photography’s kinship with sculpture and modernist abstraction. At the same time, Brandt developed the symbolist potential of photography in a series of landscapes inhabited by the spirit of Romanticism.

Brandt’s achievement in photography lies in his uncanny ability to uncover the truthful, absurd, dramatic, monumental and transcendent qualities of his subject. The exhibition spans Brandt’s entire life’s work from the early Paris photographs to the documentary work of the 1930s and ‘40s, and the later landscapes, nudes and portraits.