Bill Brandt

An exhibition of photographs by Bill Brandt, loaned by Bill Brandt and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. The exhibition toured to all Australian states and territories.

MoMA press release:

The first major one-man exhibition in this country of work by the British photographer Bill Brandt will be shown at The Museum of Modern Art from September 16 through November 30. 123 photographs made during the past three decades by the 63-year-old artist have been selected by John Szarkowski, Director of the Museum’s Department of Photography … Brandt spent much of his boyhood and youth in Europe where he studied with Man Ray and was influenced by [Eugene] Atget and the surrealist film-makers. In 1951, at the age of 25 he returned to London. During the nineteen-thirties he documented his island, its representative human types and its social structure – which seemed then immensely and permanently formidable.

‘In Brandt’s pictures’, Mr. Szarkowski says, ‘the wretched miners and the comfortable capitalists seem to have no more to do with happiness (or unhappiness) than do the stones of Stonehenge. They seem to have to do rather with the service of role, with fate, form, and tenacity and perhaps with heroism.’…

…In addition to photographs of Mayfair drawing rooms and coal miners, which are followed by pictures of black out nights in wartime London, the exhibition includes a selection from the series of nudes Brandt made during the 50s. These pictures, which at first viewing seem strange and contorted, contain a transcendent eroticism – a suspended, euphoric celebration of the flesh…

…The exhibition will travel in this country and abroad. The overseas showing will be under the sponsorship of the International Council of the Museum and the British Arts Council.