Bill Brandt is recognized throughout the world as one of the most gifted photographers of modern times. This book represents his own choice from the photographs he has taken between 1930 and 1976 and is based on the highly-prized and long out of print edition of Shadow of Light published in 1966. Brandt has now extended the collection and extensively revised the contents, including many new photographs and examples made as recently as 1976.
The book opens with a unique record of life in London in the 1930s-a life of social contrasts Brandt recorded with unequalled wit, pungency and understanding. Then follow the pictures of northern industrial towns taken during the depression of 1937.
Brandt's pictures of war-time London, the crowded nights in improvised air-raid shelters and the deserted moonlit streets of the blackout, reveal clearly the strong poetic element which is present in his work.
After this Brandt has introduced a series of humorous, unpretentious images which show a sense of the surreal. Most of these pictures were taken in the 1930s and published at the time in Paris art magazines.
From the 1940s until the present Brandt has been making a haunting series of portraits of artists and men of letters-including Dylan Thomas, Robert Graves, Francis Bacon, Graham Greene and Harold Pinter, together with an international set including Picasso, Braque, Ernst, Magritte and Robbe-Grillet. Recent additions include the actresses Glenda Jackson and Vanessa Redgrave. Then follows a section devoted to Brandt's remarkable romantic landscapes - certainly the most imaginatively constructed landscapes made by a photographer in Britain.
The book closes with Brandt's choice of nudes, a subject through which he discovered a whole new dialect for the photographic medium and for many his most celebrated and imaginative achievement.
Cyril Connolly's introduction to the previous edition is here reprinted together with a new essay by Mark Haworth-Booth of the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
The plates are printed to facsimile standard by the duotone litho process.
British born, Bill Brandt studied photography in Paris in 1929, and returned to London as a freelance in 1931. He made a notable series for the Home Office records during the air raids of 1940 and later worked for the Ministry of Information, National Buildings Record, Picture Post, and, after the war, Harper's Bazaar, Holiday and the New York Times magazine.
Brandt has had numerous one-man exhibitions in Europe and the United States, among them a full-scale retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1969 and at the Hayward Gallery, London, in 1970. More recently he has had major shows at the Marlborough Gallery in New York and London.