Some readers are old enough to remember the seminal exhibition of photography, "The Family of Man" or the book. One Brandt photograph I remember vividly is an image of children in London's East End in 1943 [which is reproduced on the title page of this book]: a row of girls on a street in front of their dreary row houses, all giggly as they watch a rather poised friend tuck up her skirt and parade in heels to imitate an adult fashion model, perhaps, or a mother. It is at once heart-warming and sad -- because they are trapped in a bleak, Dickensian environment yet having such fun.
Brandt's black and white photographs resemble such film noir images as those in "The Third Man". He was not as prolific as Brassai [whose work is currently on exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington], but he covers similar territory with a sharp eye for exposing the beauty and ugliness of a rigid class structure in the first half of the 20th century.
Brandt, born in Hamburg, later settled in England, and worked as an assistant to French surrealist Man Ray, whose influence shows, especially in photographs of nudes..
The Washington Post
Each image in this book is a jewel by itself. Taken together they illustrate the importance of Brandt to photography and the importance to us of having a man come along once in awhile who can see a little deeper into the things we all look at every day.
Zing Magazine
For the purity and the untrammelled intensity of his vision, Brandt, like the Britain he photographed so vividly during wartime, stood alone. So forceful is his presence that it is difficult to discern among the generation of British names that followed - Bailey, Mayne, McCullin - any who weren't influenced by him.
The Sunday Times, Dec 1999
LOOKING at this year's major photography books is a little like looking at the Broadway listings: You're confronted by old standbys in glossy new presentations and slick newcomers with built-in audience appeal. That comparison may be a little unfair - "old standbys" like Steichen or Irving Penn rate a lot higher than old standbys like "Annie Get Your Gun" - but the archival on the one hand and the glossy on the other do seem to capture the split.
There's an impressive variety of both influence and effect on display in "Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt". The introductory essay by photography critic Bill Jay does a fine job of delineating those influences, and of making the case that Brandt's dabbling with surrealism was a continuation of the way his more photorealist work located drama and emotion in atmosphere. "Assumption of the real is essential to surrealism," Jay writes.
But there is more of a sense of the fantastic in Brandt's "realistic" than in the photos where he is consciously emulating the surrealists. The work done in the bars of Limehouse or Stepney during the '30s, and the shots taken during the blackout of the war years when, Brandt says, London "looked more beautiful than before or since," does for that town what Brassai did for Paris. And though the nudes that play with the distortion of form are less satisfying than the ones that don't, the faces of Brandt's models - and it is the faces of people that most link them to the time in which they live - appear deceptively contemporary. Charles Taylor.
Newsweek 12-05-99
Enough of sex and death and let's move onto Art, and there is no greater artist in 20th century photography than that of Bill Brandt. Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt, was unwrapped with great anticipation and as I flicked through its pages I was thrilled to see again some of the work that first awoke me to the power and possibilities of photography.
Neil Burgess
British Journal of Photography
Bill Brandt's work has a striking poetic immediacy and a potent suggestiveness of mood rarely seen in still photography. Sombre landscapes, brooding portraits of prominent literary figures, and surreal, distorted, abstract nudes are featured in this superb, nearly comprehensive volume of the great man's oeuvre.
Just a slight glance at some of these unforgettable pictures and the viewer is hypnotized--eyes rapt to the page--drawn into a strange, mysterious world of the past and overwhelmed by its melancholy lyricism. One senses a profound humanity in Brandt's treatment of desolation and poverty: a quality comparable to the best work of Expressionist painters like Munch or Schiele.
It is interesting to note that the visual sensibility found in Brandt's high contrast, black-and-white compositions and sometimes startling, baroque perspectives also bears comparison to the cascading, labyrinthine imagery of Orson Welles's films. And the influence of Brandt's work appears evident in a number of other dreamy/nightmarish films: e.g., Ingmar Bergman's "The Silence," Roman Polanski's "Repulsion," David Lynch's "Eraserhead" and "The Elephant Man," and Michael Radford's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," to name but a few.
To put it simply: Bill Brandt is a genius of the lens - a supreme master of light and shadow - and, without a doubt, one of the most vital and innovative artists of the twentieth century.
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