Bill Brandt
He was Britain’s outstanding photographer of the 1930’ and the 1940’s, he was born and brought up in Germany and would stay a German artist even though Britain was the focal point of his work. It was in 1929 that his career fully took off.
He was attracted to morbid and secret subjects; I like this in my work as I am in some ways the same, I like to branch out in to the obscure and in some cases the dark. I have done this with my own work showing emotion and a darkness in my images like in the ‘morning of a comrade’. I also show this in my image of the blood on the hands, it quite a simple image but as a lot of meaning behind it just like Brandt’s work.
I also like that he was interested in the relationship between the sexes, one image shows a school master with a young school girl, showing the contrast in the sexes and the power balance. How the man is in charge and the women is not. He loved secrets and was fascinated with the masks that people wear and how people use those masks to hide there own secrets. I find this very interesting as everyone wears a mask even if it’s a small one, something as simple as cutting your hair a certain way is in its own way a mask. I makes you confident and you are in a séance a different person and it allows you to move around in the world. Also just wearing a certain coat is the same thing, we wear it as a makes to hid who we truly are and he explored this in his work.
He had his images featured in magazines, one of them being ‘Lilliput’, he was also employed by the ‘Picture Post’. He was commissioned by the ‘Ministry of Information’ to recorded the life of a Londoner and there impoverish lives in the air-raid shelters, tunnels of the underground, shop basements and under rail way bridges during the war. I love this work as it gives an insight of what life would have been like during this time period and during the Blitz’s, lots of people cramped in one place fighting to stay alive. His theme on war also cow insides with my own theme of war.
‘Boys boxing in Sunday best.’ 1939.
I really like this images because you get to see movement in the image its not a stationary image and was not set up by the photographer, it was genuinely a fight between two boys as you can see the blur of there hands as they are hitting each other. I feel that it captures the moment perfectly.
‘Underground shelter.’ 1940.
This shows what it would have been like in an under ground shelter during the war in the UK. I love this images as it gives us an insight of what life would have been like back then.
Bibliography:
Bill Brandt
Introduction by Ian Jeffrey
Thames & Hudson Photofile
2007.
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