Friday 12th October 2001

Bill Brandt: A Retrospective
Exhibition Of Rare Vintage Photographs Opens In San Diego

Museum of Photographic Arts [MoPA] San Diego, CA

The Bill Brandt Archive Ltd, representing the Estate of Bill Brandt the pre-eminent British photographer of the 20th century, opens a travelling exhibition at the Museum of Photographic Arts [MoPA], San Diego. The exhibition, curated by John-Paul Kernot, of The Bill Brandt Archive, is circulated by Curatorial Assistance, Los Angeles.

'Bill Brandt: A Retrospective', a collection of Brandt’s innovative work, features over 150 vintage photographs spanning more than 50 years, and will be on view at the Museum of Photographic Arts [MoPA], Balboa Park, San Diego, from October 28, 2001 - January 6, 2002.

A haunting selection from Brandt's "Perspective of Nudes" series is the tour-de-force of this retrospective. Taken with an old wooden plate camera, Brandt demonstrates the relationship of photography to sculpture and modernist abstraction.

The show is one of the first after the one-year renovation and expansion of the MoPA which has expanded the space to four times its original size, or a huge 31,225-sq. ft.

The Museum was designed by award-winning architect David Raphael Singer, and features spacious exhibition galleries, a state-of-the-art theater, and a learning center that includes an extensive photographic library.

An accompanying catalogue, ' BRANDT : The Photography of Bill Brandt ' published by Harry N. Abrams Inc., Thames & Hudson Ltd., and Editions de la Martiniere and comprising 320 pages with over 365 duotone photographs, is available through major bookstores, Amazon.com and The Bill Brandt Archive website.

Brandt's work ranges from direct photojournalism and atmospheric landscapes, to stark portraits and high contrast nudes. In contrast to his contemporaries in the United States, Brandt developed a more expressive style pushing the accepted boundaries of documentary and journalistic photography.

Brandt ( 1904-83 ) began his career in Paris in 1929, when he was introduced him to Man Ray the Surrealist master, who employed him as his assistant. In London in the early 1930s he become a freelancer for the Weekly Illustrated.

" He photographed sharp social contrasts, the glittering surfaces of a rich and imperial city, compared with its humble East End; the coal-black buildings of the northern industrial heartland and the cool, moonlit streets of black-out London during the period of eerie calm at the beginning of the Second World War", writes Mark Hayworth-Booth curator at the V&A Museum, London.

In the late 1930s, with high unemployment in England’s Industrial north, Brandt shocked a nation with candid photographs of out-of-work miners and their families. During the war, he followed the crowds into the makeshift bomb shelters underground, photographing the stoic faces of a people arrested by the nightly air raids over London.

Later, Brandt’s style changed dramatically. “I think I gradually lost my enthusiasm for reportage,” Brandt says in a rare essay. “Besides, my main theme of the past few years had disappeared; England was no longer a country of marked social contrast. It seemed to me that there were wide fields still unexplored. I began to photograph nudes, portraits, and landscapes.”

His innovative and intensely personal interpretations of the human body ranged from close-up studies to open-air beach images in which fantasy and reality often merge. He wanted a lens that would release him from normal visual constraints, that might let him see "like a mouse, a fish or a fly". His long experiment, not always understood or appreciated by his contemporaries, was published as Perspective of Nudes (1961).

Also acclaimed for his portraiture, Brandt photographed the most important artists and writers of the day; Francis Bacon, Henry Moore, Dylan Thomas, Pablo Picasso, and E.M. Forster all sat before his lens. Many of these photographs were taken at the homes or studios of the subjects, backdrops that mirror or clarify their personalities.

Brandt’s landscapes of the 1940s and 50s reflect the influence of Romanticism. Notable for painterly impressions of the English countryside, many of these pictures were taken at twilight when what Brandt called “the luxury of shadow” enfolded the scene.