Bill Brandt - Portraits - 1982

This is the NEW EDITION of the VERY SUCCESSFUL SINGLE-SELLER AUCTION by 5Uhr30.com
(Ecki Heuser, Cologne, Germany).

WONDERFUL PHOTOBOOK by famous British photographer Bill Brandt (1904-1983).

Gathers black-and-white portraits of actors, poets, musicians, philosophers, and artists and includes a discussion of the photographer's style.

More scarce hardcover variant with separate dustjacket (not to mix with the much more common paperback variant same time).

EXCELLENT, VERY FRESH CONDITION.

Bill Brandt is famous for some of the most important photobooks ever published like "The English at home" (1936), "A Night in London" (1938) or "Perspective of Nudes" (1961).

Bill Brandt's book "Perspective of Nudes" is mentioned in all important publications about photobooks:
- Andrew Roth, The Book of 101 Books, page 160/161
- Martin Parr, The Photobook, vol 1, page 216
- The Open Book, The Hasselblad Center, Stockholm, page 1888/189
- Alessandro Bertolotti, Books of Nudes, page 150/151
- 802 photobooks of the M.+M. Auer collection, page 408

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Grodon Fraser, London. 1982. First edition, first printing.

Hardcover with dustjacket. 255 x 295 mm. 116 pages. 12 pages with text plus 104 pages with 104 black and white photographs. Photos: Bill Brandt. Designed by Peter Guy. Intoduction by Alan Ross. Text in English.

Condition:
Book and dustjacket very fresh and clean with no previous owner marks and with no foxing. Light trace of use; no remarkable flaws or defects. Overall very fine condition.

Great photobook by Bill Brand with original dustjacket - in very fresh condition.

Bill Brandt is famous for some outstanding books in the history of photography -
like "The English at home" or "A Night in London".

"Born in Germany, Brandt moved to England, where Bill Brandt became known for his images of British society for such magazines as Lilliput and Picture Post; later he made distorted nudes, portraits of famous artists and landscapes. He is widely considered to be one of the most important British photographers of the 20th century.
Born in Hamburg, Germany, son of a British father and German mother, Brandt grew up during World War I, during which his father, who had lived in Germany since the age of five, was interned for six months by the Germans as a British citizen. Brandt later disowned his German heritage and would claim he was born in south London. Shortly after the war, he contracted tuberculosis and spent much of his youth in a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland. He traveled to Vienna to undertake a course of treatment by psychoanalysis. He was, in any case, pronounced cured and was taken under the wing of socialite Eugenie Schwarzwald. When Ezra Pound visited the Schwarzwald residence, Brandt made his portrait. In appreciation, Pound reportedly offered Brandt an introduction to Man Ray, whose Paris studio and darkroom Brandt would access in 1930.
In 1933 Brandt moved to London and began documenting all levels of British society. From 1936 he began to document the British class system in 1936, encouraged by his reading of George Orwell's essays and J. B. Priestley's 1934 An English Journey, He said later: "the extreme social contrast, during those years before the war, was, visually, very inspiring for me. I started by photographing in London, the West End, the suburbs, the slums." He documented the 1936 Jarrow March, then he travelled to the northeast of England, to capture the effects of the 1930s depression on the industrial landscape of the United Kingdom. He then focused predominantly on recording domestic scenes of miners in Northumberland, and then the urban landscape of Halifax, West Yorkshire, of which he later said, in a rare late career interview, as being "absolutely extraordinary; a real dream town – I'd never seen anything like it before.
This kind of documentary was uncommon at that time. Brandt published two books showcasing this work, The English at Home (1936) and A Night in London (1938). He was a regular contributor to magazines such as Lilliput, Picture Post, and Harper's Bazaar. He documented the Underground bomb shelters of London during The Blitz in 1940, commissioned by the Ministry of Information. Brandt took a total of 39 photos between the 4th and 12th of November before he had to stop due to catching the flu. The photos were taken with a Rolleiflex camera.
During World War II Brandt concentrated on many subjects – as can be seen in his Camera in London (1948) but excelled in portraiture and landscape. To mark the arrival of peace in 1945 he began a celebrated series of nudes. His major books from the post-war period are Literary Britain (1951), and Perspective of Nudes (1961), followed by a compilation of his best work, Shadow of Light (1966). Brandt became Britain's most influential and internationally admired photographer of the 20th century.
Many of his works have important social commentary but also poetic resonance. A well-known picture is Dancing the Lambeth Walk, showing a line of teenage girls laughing as one of their number, in borrowed high heels, dances jauntily, her right hand blurred in motion. Originally published in 1943 in the magazine Picture Post, it is one of four by Brandt that appeared in world-touring The Family of Man, attended by more than 9 million visitors, and in the accompanying book catalogue.
His landscapes and nudes are dynamic, intense and powerful, often using wide-angle lenses and distortion.
Brandt died in London in 1983."
(Wikipedia)