Bill Brandt, the subject of a brilliant retrospective at MOMA, was the photographer who best defined England in the years just before the Second World War. Born in Hamburg and trained in Paris, where he couldn’t resist the heady influence of Man Ray, Atget, and Brassaï, he settled in London, in 1934. There, he grounded his uneasy Surrealism in a more sombre modernism—a style that was well suited to the stark social landscape of maids and miners, pubs and drawing rooms. Brandt made the most of what he called “this power of seeing the world as fresh and strange,” and really came into his own when Londoners huddled in bomb shelters and the streets were full of rubble. After the war, he continued to explore dark corners, including interiors occupied by Vanessa Redgrave, E. M. Forster, Martin Amis, and, most memorably, by a series of anonymous nude women. When Brandt took those models outdoors, usually to a pebbled beach, he returned to his avant-garde roots, creating photographs of figures as monumental and as abstract as Henry Moore sculptures. ♦
