Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt by Bill Jay, Nigel Warburton, David Hockney & Bill Brandt
4to. pp. 320. profusely illustrated. hardcover. dw. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999.
New in publisher's shrink wrap.
ISBN-10: 0810941090 / ISBN-13: 9780810941090
_______________________________________________________________________________________________
Bill Brandt, one of the most prolific 20th-century photographers, is beautifully represented by this volume, which contains nearly 400 of his black-and-white photographs. These range from his famous, starkly disturbing portraits of the denizens of either end of the social ladder to his late, poetic landscapes and cool, studied, abstract nudes. In between are several series that contain singular images of great familiarity, such as his portrait of painter Francis Bacon in an eerie, lamp-lit landscape, or the one of two housemaids in starched white caps standing at attention behind an upper-crust dining-room table. Brandt's passionate interest in the shocking juxtaposition of the very rich and the very poor brought him a wide audience as well as accusations of being a Socialist propagandist. During the Great Depression, Brandt traveled to the north of England and made some of the most devastating pictures of his career, exposing the extreme poverty--and dignity--of the area's coal miners.