Bill Brandt - A Centenary Retrospective

This spring the V&A celebrates the centenary of the birth of Bill Brandt (1904-83), Britain's best-loved photographer of modern times, with a major exhibition. This retrospective presents 155 mainly vintage gelatin-silver prints from the Bill Brandt Archive.

Mark Haworth-Booth, the V&A's Senior Curator of Photographs, who worked on many projects with Brandt, says: "This is a very special exhibition of Bill Brandt's work - the essential works of an essential photographer, using rare prints from his own archive. It is the finest selection of his prints to be seen in Britain for over 30 years."

Bill Brandt remains one of the pre-eminent photographers of the 20th century. He documented the vivid social contrasts in Britain between the World Wars. He also photographed the landscapes of Literary Britain and a pantheon of great artists and writers, as well as creating his outstanding series Perspective of Nudes.

Brandt began his career as a photographer in Vienna in 1928 before moving to Paris in 1929 where he assisted Man Ray. He settled in London in 1931 and freelanced for illustrated magazines, becoming the great documentarian of British cultural and social life. The exhibition includes arresting images of the East End, the northern industrial heartlands and the moonlit streets of blacked-out London at the beginning of the Second World War. Brandt also photographed the crowds sheltering in Underground stations during the Blitz. Experimenting with the landscape form, he travelled on wartime trains to the most poetic of Britain's scenic settings. The exhibition will feature evocative images of Thomas Hardy's 'Wessex' and the Bronte sisters' Yorkshire Moors.

After the war, Brandt turned his attention to nudes, portraits and further landscapes, returning to his interest in the surreal. He acquired a wide-angle Kodak camera and began to photograph nudes, first in Victorian interiors and then outside on the beaches of England and France. These dramatic, sculptural images of nudes merging with the landscape radically revised the photography of the nude.

From the 1940s onwards, Brandt became a sought-after portraitist. Capable of conveying the very essence of his subjects, he produced revealing images of figures such as Pablo Picasso, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon and Graham Greene, all of which will be included in the exhibition.

An accompanying display in the V&A's Photography gallery, Other Sides of Bill Brandt, features less familiar aspects of Brandt's work. This display is based around two albums compiled by Brandt's first wife, Eva Boros, covering their early years together in Vienna, Paris, Spain and England from 1928-39. These marvellous albums have recently been acquired by the V&A and allow visitors to see close-up and for the first time the making of a great photographer.

Bill Brandt had a close association with the V&A, which collected his work from 1964 until his death in 1983. Pressetext

Bill Brandt - A Centenary Retrospective
Kurator: John-Paul Kernot