Seaford, East Sussex Coast
Bill Brandt British, born Germany
Not on view
Bill Brandt is known for his photographs of London society (high and low) and for his documentation of the improvised air-raid shelters in the London Underground during Germany’s intense bombing campaign known as the Blitz (1940–41). After World War II, perhaps to cleanse his eye, he embarked on an innovative series of nudes using an out-of-date wooden view camera with a wide-angle lens and no shutter. The novelist Lawrence Durrell described the photographs in 1961 as "a prolonged mediation on the mystery of forms." Brandt’s intention was to see with an altered perspective the world then just beginning its own recovery. He hoped the awkward camera designed by Kodak for making close-up pictures of crime scenes might allow him to see "perhaps, like a mouse, a fish or a fly."
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