Beschreibung:

Bill Brandt Vastérival, Normandy 1957 Gelatin silver print. 21.9 x 19.5 cm (8 5/8 x 7 5/8 in.) Two credit stamps and numbered '3', '30' in an unidentified hand in ink on the verso.
Provenance Gift of an East Coast Collector, 1990 Literature Gordon Fraser, Bill Brandt Nudes 1945-1980, pl. 30 Thames & Hudson, Brandt Nudes: A New Perspective, p. 89 Catalogue Essay German-born Bill Brandt indisputably brought the British to a new understanding of their culture, heritage, and point of view. He started his career in Paris as a studio assistant for Man Ray, but he left his early exposure to surrealism unexplored until after establishing himself in the 1930s as England’s great photojournalist. A turning point came in Brandt’s work in 1944, when, directly following the Normandy invasion, he purchased a wideangle lens camera used by the police to document crime scenes; with this new equipment, Brandt left behind his keenly observed documentation of English public society and turned inward, to strange and wonderful portrayals of the female nude set in private--or nearly claustrophobic--interiors. His earliest nudes, taken indoors, presenting the models as beautiful aliens, strangely situated on chairs or suggestively positioned in front of recently inhabited beds, with white flesh ethereally lit by large windows or doors left ajar. Over time Brandt moved his camera almost unbearably closer, abstracting the body until it flooded the lens, conjuring fleshy fields with the enormity of an English landscape. Eventually Brandt took a Superwide Hasselblad camera out of doors, travelling to the edge of the sea. There, amongst the rocks and pebbles, the metamorphosis of Brandt’s nudes was complete. Read More