Bill Brandt: Photographs 1928-1983

From BooklistEngland's most interesting, most British photographer was German-born Bill Brandt. Widely traveled as a young man, Brandt resided in England after 1931, and the character of that country became his most constant theme. He pursued it through documentary work published first in magazines, then in such books asThe English at Home (1936),A Night in London (1938),Camera in London (1948), andLiterary Britain (1951). His nudes, produced later and published inPerspective of Nudes (1961), along with a group of landscapes of England, round out a body of work so dazzling and yet so puzzling that most interpreters fail to take it all into account. They emphasize either matters of social class and documentary photography or Brandt's powerful formal inventions (e.g., the starkness of contrast in his prints, using an antique wide-angle lens for the highly abstract nudes). Jeffrey suggests unifying artistic and psychoanalytic themes emerging from Brandt's childhood as subtexts in Brandt's documentary work (unfortunately, Jeffrey makes too many references to pictures not in the book).Gretchen Garner