Bill Brandt

Featuring images spanning his entire career, this comprehensive monograph explores the hidden themes behind the work of photographer Bill Brandt. With a career spanning nearly half a century, Bill Brandt, an English photographer of German birth, was a master of several major genres of photography: photojournalism, portraiture, the nude, and landscapes. At first glance, Brandt’s genres may appear unrelated, but when analyzing his career in its entirety, a common theme comes to the forefront: what psychologist Sigmund Freud and philosopher Eugenio Trias called “the sinister.” From his earliest photographs taken as an amateur in the 1930s to his late portraits and studies of the female body, Brandt expresses a fascination with the strange and dark aspects of life that only he can reveal. With two hundred photographs from throughout Brandt’s career, this book adds a crucial chapter to the analysis of this key figure in twentieth-century photography, Bill Brandt is set to become an authoritative retrospective.