Inspired By A Master Bio
Beginning:
Bill Brandt was born in Hamburg on 2 May 1904 to an English father and a German mother. He made the watercolor painting of the family house in 1918 when he was 14. Brandt was bullied at school after the First World War. This experience and the rise of Nazism caused him to disown his German background. In later life he said that he was born in south London.
In 1927 he traveled to Vienna, where he was taken up by Dr Eugenie Schwarz. She found him a position in a portrait studio. It is likely that she also introduced him to the American poet Ezra Pound. Pound apparently gave Brandt an immensely valuable introduction to Man Ray. Brandt assisted Man Ray in Paris for several months in 1930. Here he witnessed the heyday of Surrealist film and grasped the new poetic possibilities of photography.
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Middle:
In the 1920s he was taken up by Man Ray and other Surrealists as a major photographer in his own right. In the photograph Flea Market Brandt reworks a favourite Atget subject
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Night photography became one of Brandt's specialities and this may be his earliest experiment in the genre. Here he posed his first wife Eva Boros as a nightwalker in the red light district of Hamburg. Family and friends were to play many roles in his social documentary scenes.Raymond Mortimer's introduction to the book praised Brandt for the freshness of his observation and the acuteness with which he saw and photographed such contrasts. Was first published in 1938.
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