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Campden Hill, London

Bill Brandt British, born Germany
April 1949
Not on view
Born to a prosperous mercantile family in Hamburg and educated in Europe, Brandt absorbed the lessons of the Surrealists while perfecting his photographic technique in Man Ray’s studio in Paris in 1929. He then settled in London, where, like his contemporaries André Kertész, Brassaï, and Henri Cartier-Bresson in Paris, he made his name in the 1930s with photographs that pretended to objective reportage. His constant search for more expressive and poetic subjects brought him to the realization that his richest storehouse of imagery was not the external world but the mysterious chambers of his own imagination. In the psychologically haunting and formally inventive portraits and nudes of the next fifteen years, the photographer explored his private fantasies through the distorting lens of a wide-angle camera. The compressed space in Nude, Campden Hill, London, for instance, suggests both the incongruous scale inversions and claustrophobic Victorian atmosphere of Alice in Wonderland, one of Brandt’s favorite books, and the hallucinatory, kinesthetic exaggerations of the Surrealists.

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Campden Hill, London
  • Artist: Bill Brandt (British (born Germany), Hamburg 1904–1983 London)
  • Date: April 1949
  • Medium: Gelatin silver print
  • Dimensions: 24.1 x 19.7 cm (9 1/2 x 7 3/4 in.)
  • Classification: Photographs
  • Credit Line: Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, The Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel, and The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1986
  • Object Number: 1986.1053.1
  • Rights and Reproduction: © Bill Brandt / Bill Brandt Archive Ltd.
  • Curatorial Department: Photographs

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A Room in Haworth Parsonage
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St. John's Churchyard, Hampstead, Bill Brandt British, born Germany, Gelatin silver print
St. John's Churchyard, Hampstead
Bill Brandt
1940s
Françoise Rosay, Belgravia, London, Bill Brandt British, born Germany, Gelatin silver print
Françoise Rosay, Belgravia, London
Bill Brandt
1950s–60s
Sunday at Brighton Before the War, Bill Brandt British, born Germany, Gelatin silver print
Sunday at Brighton Before the War
Bill Brandt
ca. 1936
Parlourmaid at a Window in Kensington, Bill Brandt British, born Germany, Gelatin silver print
Parlourmaid at a Window in Kensington
Bill Brandt
1936–39

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