Bill Brandt | Photographer | Blue Plaques | English Heritage". english-heritage.org.uk . Retrieved 23 July 2022.

Brandt spent the next three years traveling (with his camera) around Europe, visiting the Hungarian steppe, Hamburg, Madrid, and Barcelona. In 1932, he married Eva Boros (the first of three wives), whom he had first met at Kollinger's studio. The couple set up home in the north London area of Belsize Park. In 1934, the Paris-based Surrealist magazine Minotaure published one of Brandt's early images, but England was to provide the inspiration for his most famous photographs. Around this time Brandt was also experimenting with montage techniques that combined portions of two or more negatives in one print. One of his best-known examples was an image called Early Morning on the River (1935). It features a seagull in flight that was superimposed onto a shot of a foggy River Thames. (Later, Brandt added a morning sun to the scene for a commissioned magazine feature.) I consider it essential that the photographer should do his own printing and enlarging. The final effect of the finished print depends so much on these operations. And only the photographer himself knows the effect he wants. He should know by instinct, grounded in experience, what subjects are enhanced by hard or soft, light or dark treatment. But … no amount of toying with shades of print or with printing papers will transform a commonplace photograph into anything other than a commonplace photograph… It is part of the photographer’s job to see more intensely than most people do. Bill Brandt Manipulating the Negative Edith and Osbert Sitwell (1892-1969), 1945, Renishaw Hall, Derbyshire, in front of a family group by J.S. Sargent He decided to pursue a career in photojournalism, a profession still in its infancy. However, Brandt was a photojournalist with a difference. For under the tutelage of Man Ray, Brandt had developed his own moody, surreal style. Brandt followed her advice and secured an apprenticeship with the Austrian photographer Grete Kolliner.Suspended social life, long railway journeys and the need to reaffirm ideas of national identity all encouraged a return to the literary classics. Brandt shared in this. He read and admired the writings of the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy, George Crabbe and John Clare, some of whose poems he knew by heart. From 1945 onwards Brandt contributed a series of landscape photographs, accompanied by texts selected from British writers, to Lilliput. Other landscapes appeared in Picture Post and the American magazine Harper's Bazaar. Poet Laureate. A pioneer in the revival of interest in Victorian architecture, and other unfashionable subjects Both a visual poet and a historian, his pictures capture and preserve a world that has disappeared forever.

His photos were more experimental and characterized by a mysterious and brooding quality that provided a fresh look on some of the most common genres: portraiture, landscape and the nude. Bill Brandt: Nudes 1945–1980. Introduction by Michael Hiley. London and Bedford: G. Fraser/Boston: New York Graphic Society, 1980. ISBN 9780860920519/ISBN 9780821210970. Priestly described the condition of the north east, where the effects of the Depression and the closure of ship-building yards had resulted in 80% unemployment: 'The whole town looked as if it had entered a perpetual penniless bleak Sabbath. The men wore the drawn masks of prisoners of war'. Brandt carefully documented coal-searching - the retrieval of small lumps of coal from spoil heaps - and the domestic life of miners.Although Brandt’s photography career began with his portrait of Ezra Pound in 1928, he didn’t return to the genre until the 1940s. Jay, Bill and Nigel Warburton. Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt. London: Thames and Hudson, 1999. Brandt, Bill. Literary Britain/ 2nd revised and expanded edition with introduction by John Hayward, foreword by Sir Roy Strong, afterward by Mark Haworth-Booth and Tom Hopkinson. London: Victoria and Albert Museum in association with Hurtwood Press, 1984. These were not the first Brandt works to be acquired by the V&A. Up until 1977, photographs at the V&A were acquired by the National Art Library as models and research material for 'all variety of workers'. At the time, denied a place within the Museum's curatorial departments, modern photographs made their way into the collection through the Circulation department which provided loan exhibitions to regional museums and colleges throughout the UK. It was through the Circulation department that the first Brandt acquisition of twenty-six nudes was made by the Museum in 1964. This was followed in 1975 by twelve works chosen by Curator Mark Haworth-Booth and included in the touring exhibition 'The Land' which were shown along with Brandt's own selection. In 1977, photographs acquired by the Library and Circulation departments were formally transferred to the newly formed photographs section and all the Brandt photographs were consolidated within the same department.

Bill Brandt enjoyed working in the darkroom and liked to experiment, making many prints of the same negative. While Brandt didn’t want to be pinned down to weekly assignments, he did produce quite a bit of work for Lilliput and Picture Posr and, later, Harper’s Bazaar. In fact, all his work in portraiture was commissioned by commercial magazines. He took these assignments seriously, wanting the photographs to be more than snapshots that only showed a likeness at a given moment. His images of Britain’s cultural, artistic and literary figures were meant to last. In 1984, Bill Brandt was posthumously inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum. [5] Blue plaque, 4 Airlie Gardens Novelist; author of The House in Paris and The Death of the Heart (both 1935) Published Harper’s Bazaar, N.Y., April 1946, and Lilliput, November 1949His witty pictures of social life in London during the 1930s and his compassionate photographs during the depression are some of his most memorable images. Cyril Connolly published Brandt's shelter photographs in Horizon in February 1942. In 1966 Connolly wrote that '"Elephant and Castle 3.45 a.m." eternalises for me the dreamlike monotony of wartime London.' Brandt himself recalled 'the long alley of intermingled bodies, with the hot, smelly air and continual murmur of snores'. Feeling frustrated by modern cameras and lenses which seemed designed to imitate human vision and conventional sight, I was looking everywhere for a camera with a very wide angle. One day in a second hand shop, near Covent Garden, I found a 70-year-old wooden Kodak. I was delighted. Like nineteenth-century cameras it had no shutter, and the wide-angle lens, with an aperture as minute as a pinhole, was focused on infinity. Bill Brandt Please note: sitters’ biographical dates have been updated from the original hand list. Updated December 2012). In 1977, Brandt began a second series of nudes, which appeared along with some earlier photographs in the book Nudes 1945-1980(1981).