Bill Brandt

Bill Brandt (Germany, 1904–United Kingdom, 1983). Born Hermann Wilhelm Brandt in Hamburg, he began his career in photography during his stays at the Swiss sanatoriums in Agra and Davos and completed his training in Vienna. In 1930, he moved to Paris, where he worked briefly as an assistant to Man Ray, and in 1934 he settled in London. He explored social documentary, portraiture, nudes, and landscape photography.

His photography combines reality and fiction through a post-Romantic atmosphere marked by strangeness, mystery, and the notion of the unheimlich. Although he was influenced by Surrealism, he did not actively participate in its groups, and his early images are also related to the urban photography of Eugène Atget. In the United Kingdom, he documented social inequalities and developed a personal vision of the country, which he adopted as the core of his identity.

In 1936, he published his first book, "The English at Home", based on the visual contrast between different social classes. During World War II, she worked for the Ministry of Information and photographed Londoners taking refuge in subway stations and on streets darkened by the bombings. Her work is part of the collections of the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Tate in London, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, among others.