Bill Brandt

Photography is not a sport. It has no rules. Everything must be dared and tried.'
Bill Brandt

Bill Brandt (1904-83) is the finest British photographer of modern times. He photographed with imagination, compassion and humour. His photographs show us the vivid interactions of social life and the realities of labour and class. He is a witness to the Depression of the 1930s and the Blitz of 1940. He revised and renewed the major artistic genres of portraiture, landscape and the nude.

Bill Brandt brought to the British scene a unique sensibility formed elsewhere, as this site shows. He saw Britain with the eyes of a continental European and a Surrealist.
A surrealist and social documenter.
Born in Germany but saw himself as British.
Assisted Man Ray
Reworked images of Eugène Atget (1857-1927) so he would be an appropriate photographer to re work yourselves.
Specialised in night photography & social documentary scenes.


'I photographed pubs, common lodging houses at night, theatres, Turkish baths, prisons and people in their bedrooms. London has changed so much that some of these pictures now have a period charm almost of another century.'


'In 1939, at the beginning of the war, I was back in London photographing the blackout. The darkened town, lit only by moonlight, looked more beautiful than before or since.