Bill Brandt
PhotographerKnown for: documentary photography of British class; the distorted nude series
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.
Gear & Materials(1)
Hasselblad
Produced from 1970 to 1994, the 500C/M is a modular medium format SLR using 120 or 220 film. Its interchangeable magazines, focusing screens, and Carl Zeiss lenses made it the standard camera in professional studio and location photography for three decades.
“Brandt's distorted nude series — the wide-angle, near-abstract images of the body made from the 1940s onward — was shot on a converted Kodak wide-angle camera initially and later with Hasselblad; the square format and the extreme depth of field he achieved are documented in "Bill Brandt: Shadow of Light" (1966) and in the Victoria and Albert Museum's Brandt archive.”
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