Bill Brandt on : 'The Body'

As well as the previous blog post about Sally Mann, I also want to look at Bill Brandt's work again.  This work always inspires me and make me want to get creative and work on nudes again.

Bill Brandt had once been called England's greatest modern photographer! He was born in germany, launched in Paris and is still called a great English photographer.  Bill Brandt was a studio assistant to Man Ray.  He started documenting class differences in England during the depression (1936), he produced two series of night out, one is Paris (1932) and one in London (1938), and then got jobs at a number of publications.

Brandt moved on to a very avant-garde view of European painters and sculptors, these photographs seem to be more like studies of sculptural form than depictions of the human body.  So, he started as Man Ray's assistant in the 1920's, and post-war and after Surrealist interests started his role as a photographer - he stopped doing documentary style photography and started creating more imaginative, aesthetic images that led to concentration on the female nude as his principal theme.  I have shown some of his nude images here below that I think look very sleek, unique and sophisticated.

Throughout all of his nude images there is a slight distortion with the human form, he shows the body through camera angles and manipulation of the arms, legs, feet and fingers and shows poses and positions that resemble objects in Surrealist painting and sculpture.

Because of the manipulation of the body parts and figure, the nudes look like studies of sculptural form.  I find that the images have a quality thats irresistible.  Knees, arms, fingers and toes acquire a shocking aesthetic interest. His black and white photography brought some of the blackest blacks in photography and is simply smooth, and elegant.

I love all of the above images and think that they do the female body justice to look beautiful, The positions on the rocks look great and the shadows look great to pick up detail and shapes.  But my favourite Nude images by Bill Brandt are these five images below. I think they look beautiful and sleek and smooth.  I was very thankful to get quite a lot of praise on my nude images I done, but I would like to try out this technique and try using the body to create different shapes.

I particularly like the centre images of the knees and elbow, it almost seems as if they are rocks balanced on top of each other, rather than being body parts, to be able to get the look of something, almost like a landscape is a great effect.  The two females sitting on a rock at the bottom left also look like two rocks, they way the sun light is shining on their backs gives off such a smooth look.  Female legs are great to use in nude photography as you can do quite a lot of positions with them, they can create straight lines as well as curves and bends to, like said earlier, create images that looks like sculptures.

I was close to creating a sculpture for my Mixed Media assignment and Bill Brandt's work would have been a great source for that.  But as far as my ideas on my major practical, I am still looking into the body - all images from all my inspirational photographer's will help to give me ideas for my 'body' images. I know that I can consider looking at different shapes to create great effects.