LOT Phillips de Pury & Company  /  PHOTOGRAPHS PART II  / 

103

BILL BRANDT (British, b. Germany, 1904-1983) LONDON signed

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BILL BRANDT (British, b. Germany, 1904-1983) LONDON signed
BILL BRANDT (British, b. Germany, 1904-1983) LONDON signed "Bill Brandt" in black ink below image on mount gelatin silver print mounted on board 13 1/2 x 11 3/8 in. (34.3 x 28.9 cm) mount: 19 7/8 x 16 in. (50.5 x 40.6 cm) 1953 printed 1970s PROVENANCE Manfred Heiting Private Collection, NEW YORK LITERATURE Bill Brandt, PERSPECTIVE OF NUDES, NEW YORK, 1961, pl. 30 (illustrated) Cyril Connolly and Mark Haworth-Booth, SHADOW OF LIGHT: PHOTOGRAPHS BY BILL BRANDT, NEW YORK, 1977, pl. 132 (illustrated) Bill Brandt, Nudes: 1945-1980, boston, 1980, pl. 23 (illustrated) LES GRANDS MAîTRES DE LA PHOTO: BILL BRANDT, Paris, 1984, p. 38 (illustrated) OF PEOPLE AND PLACES: THE FLOYD AND JOSEPHINE SEGEL COLLECTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY, Milwaukee, 1987, p. 51 (illustrated) Ian Jeffrey, BILL BRANDT: PHOTOGRAPHS 1928-1983, LONDON, 1993, cover and p. 173 (illustrated twice) Ian Jeffrey, BILL BRANDT, Paris, 1994, pl. 57 (illustrated) David Hockney, et al, BRANDT: THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF BILL BRANDT, NEW YORK, 1999, pl. 225 (illustrated) In 1945, Bill Brandt grew tired of his documentary approach to photography. He discovered the camera that would allow him to challenge photographic conventions at a secondhand store in Covent Garden. It was a large, old, mahogany Kodak that, like mid-19th century cameras, had no shutter, only a pin-hole aperture with a wide-angle lens that focused on infinity. Brandt discovered that by placing the camera in the corner of a room, the lens absorbed the whole panorama like a convex mirror. Brandt's desire to explore subjects using this camera was inspired by Orson Welles' 1941 classic film CITIZEN KANE, for which he used a wide-angle lens. Both of these photographs (Lots 103 and 104) fall into the period when Brandt created intimate close-ups of the human body, sometimes allowing them to fill the entire frame. "In PERSPECTIVE OF NUDES, Brandt tells a story. It is the tale of a journey from a shadowed nineteenth-century romantic past, through many changes of location and position, to a final destination - a sun-filled place of creative freedom and amplitude where everything seen has two simultaneous meanings. Perhaps, on the basis of what we now know of him, Bill Brandt was telling a story analogical to his own. During his life, he journeyed from a city in northern Europe where he grew up under constriction, passed through places during strange and surprising moments in their history, and finally reached the imaginative openness and sun and warmth of a Mediterranean shore" (Haworth-Booth, BEHIND THE CAMERA, p. 64).
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