BILL BRANDT - THE ENCHANTED THIRD EYE

Harper's Bazaar

November 1966

Every artist sees with unique insight, and a great photographer uses a third eye - his camera lens - to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary, the drab into the poetic; or conversely to intensify the essence of reality. This four-page portfolio is the work of England's Bill Brandt - many of whose photographs, including the haunting self-portrait above, were taken expressly for Harper's Bazaar.

Harper's Bazaar

November 1966

The revealing portrait of the late Dame Edith Sitwell and her brother Sir Osbert Sitwell, standing beneath a family group painted by Sargeant, was taken in 1945 at Renishaw Hall. This and the next two photographs are from Brandt's book of photographs, Shadow of Light - an anthology of thirty years' work - being published on November 7 by Viking Press, with a Cyril Connolly introduction.

Harper's Bazaar

November 1966

NUDE, EAST SUSSEX COAST, APRIL 1953

Bill Brandt decided-according to Connolly, probably during World War II-to stress poetry rather than reportage in his photography. Long a student and admirer of Man Ray, an American genius of the decades between the two wars, Brandt reflects his influence in nudes like this, which he sees as near abstraction, alabaster landscapes of some far, mythical moon country.

Harper's Bazaar

November 1966

Evolving his own highly personal portrait style over the years, Brandt arrived at what can often be described as a natural surrealism, of which this portrait of a young girl taken in 1955 is an excellent example. Neither figure nor background is conscientiously distorted, but they are placed in an unexpected relationship to each other that heightens the mysterious, transcendental quality of both.

Harper's Bazaar

November 1966

Man Ray solarization of Vicomtesse de Noailles 

1937

Man Ray Harper's Bazaar 

1942

The elegant gentleman photographer Bill Brandt is considered one of the most important British photographers of the 20^th century.

Born in 1904 into a wealthy family of German merchants and bankers, Brandt was raised in the cold and authoritarian atmosphere of the haut bourgeois. Brandt’s father, born in London, passed on his British citizenship although Brandt remained in Germany throughout his youth.

In his teens Brandt experienced a grim school-life as a boarder taunted by classmates, derided for his differences attributed to his uncommon British background. Further trauma continued to plague the young Brandt when he contracted tuberculosis and was transferred to a Swiss sanatorium. Once physically cured, Brandt moved on to a period of psychoanalysis in Vienna. It was in Vienna that Brandt was first introduced to photography through Dr. Eugenie Schwarzwald, the Vienna hostess who encouraged the social development of youth through her literary salon and her support of Vienna’s cultural life. It was Eugenie who suggested photography to Brandt and introduced him to the talented Jewish portrait photographer Grete Kolliner, in whose studio he learnt the basic of photography. Here, he would develop the lighting and retouching skills that affected his later work.

Departing Vienna for Paris in 1930, Brandt spent time in the studio of Man Ray, learning through observation, the proficiencies that ultimately elevated his photography to an art form.

With four years of the Paris experience under his belt, Brant settled in London where he began his photojournalism career in earnest, putting to work all that he had gleaned from these cultural capitals of the world.