Bill Brandt's life is a mystery. His work struck at the heart of what was 'English', from the publication of his first book The English at Home in the thirties to his later famous landscapes. He died in London in 1983, still holding to the claim that he was from South London. In fact he was born in 1904 in Hamburg. This, the only biography, is published on the centenary of his birth. In many respects he was a mid-century mid-European. He was sent from a strict German school to a sanatorium in Davos, suffering from TB. He first studied photography in Vienna, where he photographed Ezra Pound and where he became interested in psychoanalysis. He travelled in Spain during the Civil War years. He became Man Ray's assistant for a brief period in Paris, where he adsorbed surrealism. He moved to England in the thirties and worked as a great documentary photographer for the emerging picture magazines such as Picture Post. On assignment to the Gorbals, he made the Glasgow streets look like scenes from de Chirico. His nudes, mostly on a beach in Normandy, were masterpieces, his portraits covered the celebrated of his generation as well as figures from all strata of English society and his landscapes were sublime. He was an inspiration for a later generation including the photographer Don McCullin. Brandt's England was not so much a reality he recorded, as a phantasm he constructed. Delany's biography explores the fantasy and its roots. It is accompanied by many of the great Brandt works, integrated throughout and reproduced in duotone full-page.

Bill Brandt : A Biography

Arts & Photography

Paul Delany

Individual Artists

Jonathan Cape Ltd.

The first full biography - beautifully illustrated - of Britain's greatest photographer. Bill Brandt, the greatest of British photographers who visually defined the English identity in the mid-twentieth century, was an enigma. A shy and complex man, his life (prior to his arrival in England and the publication of his first book The English at Home in 1936) placed him at the centre of European artistic currents which were to shape his subsequent vision and equip him with the means to portray 'Englishness' unlike any photographer before him, and perhaps unlike any who have followed After his death in 1983, Brandt left a complicated trail behind him. In this first critical biography of Brandt, Paul Delany has ambitiously traced his early background - from a merchant's family in Hamburg and a period in a Davos TB sanatorium to an apprenticeship in a photographic studio in Vienna in the Twenties, where he met and photographed Ezra Pound and also underwent psychoanalysis; from his travels in Spain in the Thirties to his brief period in the Paris studio of Man Ray - and revealed how biographical facts and the fantasies that accompanied them deeply affected Brandt's work. Richly illustrated with duotone reproductions of his masterpieces and a number of unpublished private photographs, Bill Brandt's mystery is unravelled in this illuminating account.

Bill Brandt

Random House]

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Books by Paul Delany

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Paul Delany. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Bill Brandt : A Biography

Bill Brandt