Bill Brandt

Bill Brandt spent time in Man Ray's Paris studio before returning to Britain in the 1930s and producing a body of documentary work on class - the lives of coal miners in the north, the servants of the wealthy south - that remains among the most socially precise photography made in England. His later nudes, shot with an extremely wide-angle lens that distorted perspective and form, produced images of the human body that had no precedent in British photography. He was largely self-taught.