Black and white photograph by Bill Brandt, 'Nude, East Sussex Coast', gelatin silver print, 1979

A black and white photograph by Bill Brandt taken from the shoulders down, of a female nude lying prone on a rocky coastline. Her arms are folded across her stomach and her knees are bent. There are cliffs in the background.

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Bill Brandt became interested in a career as a photographer in his early twenties. He worked in Man Ray’s studio in Paris for three months in 1929. There was little direct teaching from Man Ray but Brandt was able to absorb the exciting developments in photography and other media of Surrealism in Paris. He was also studying the street photography of Eugène Atget, which was being re-evaluated by artists including Man Ray and Berenice Abbott.

Brandt came to live in London in 1932. During the first few years in London, Brandt’s photography was mainly self-motivated. His first book The English at Home was published in 1936. The book shows the social diversity of urban life, often juxtaposing images to highlight social contrasts. Many of the images were staged by Brandt using family, friends and models to act out the scenes he wished to create.

For the next decade he worked mainly on commissions for the picture press and also from the British government. His major markets were Lilliput, Picture Post and the English and American editions of Harper’s Bazaar.

In 1940 Brandt was commissioned by the Home Office to photograph the conditions of London’s air-raid shelters. Some of his photographs were published alongside Henry Moore’s shelter drawings in Lilliput magazine. He also undertook commissions for Picture Post on the war effort in Britain.

After the war Brandt continued his photojournalist assignments, concentrating on photographs of the British countryside. In 1950 the publishers Cassell & Co. commissioned Brandt to compile his landscape photographs and finish the series for a book which was published the following year, entitled Literary Britain. During this period (and up to 1960) Brandt was also producing nude studies, shown in interiors and also on seashores. Brandt continued to work up until his death, reprinting many of his photographs as well as working on new commissions.

Attribution note: This is a gelatin-silver print on fibre-based developing-out paper. It was produced in the 1970s, when Brandt was printing his photographs (often reprinting from old negatives) in a large format, which he called ‘drawing-room size’, and with a high contrast of black and white. The printing out of his work had always been of great importance to Brandt. He would, for example, print a daytime image to look like a twilight scene, use compound negatives and crop a negative in order to create the atmosphere he wanted. In this image you can see that the rocks and tops of the cliffs have been retouched.

Bill Brandt’s exploration of the nude as a subject for his work began after the Second World War. The hallmark of this work is the abstraction of the female body, usually concentrated in the foreground of the images. He sometimes employed a distortion so extreme that the photographed body part would be barely recognisable. Brandt initially used a Kodak wide-angle camera for his nude studies. An object more than four feet from the camera was in focus and the 110 angle covered by the lens meant that the whole scope of a scene would be seen inside the frame.

This image, in the style of his earlier wide-angle nudes, places the nude in the foreground, her body extending into the background. The camera is placed very close to the model’s face, placing the viewer in the unsettling position of knowing that the nude is the object of the photograph and also having to view the scene through the ‘eyes’ of the nude. We are both viewer and subject of the picture.

PH.256-1981