Bill Brandt

Bill Brandt Landscape




" Bill Brandt is regarded as one of the great paragons of British photography. His singular eye gave him a unique take on the quintessence of Britishness, and he formed an archive of images that are as socially powerful as they are visually poetic. Brandt is known for documenting Britain and its people the rich and poor, the celebrated artist and the unknown miner but also for his idiosyncratic nude studies that obsessed him from 1951. "

http://www.beetlesandhuxley.com/exhibitions/bill-brandt.html?page=1



Here are a selection of images by Bill Brandt which i felt most inspired me, interested me and were what i felt linked best with the kind of black and white film photography i would like to aim to achieve. 

Something which seems to be interesting me most about landscape photography in town settings, especially in Hartlepool, is terraced housing. Just on the brink of the the very centre of hartlepool's town centre a lot of terraced housing can be found. Many aged, worn, run down and some standing empty. Im interesting in exploring the idea of capturing these rows of housing using several different view points. I enjoy looking straight down streets with terraced housing either side as i like the way especially in an image, the eye is drawn from the front of the image into the depth of the image by the straight narrowing road. Im really inspired by Bill Brandt's images taken from a high view point of terraced housing, they really go to show how different something can begin to look when simply changing the view point. 

Many of Bill Brandt's images appear to be created with the aim of appearing almost abstract; Many of his images included geometric lines and patterns. 

This is an image which particularly inspires me. The repetitive patterns of the traced housing create quite an abstract feel to the image. What i feel is most successful is the way the viewers eye tends to be drawn across all of the image because of the continual lines in directions which lead from the foreground to the background of the image. 

"In 1945 Brandt bought a special Kodak camera in a second-hand camera shop in Covent Garden, London. The camera had been designed to enable untrained police staff to photograph crime scenes. It had a very wide-angle lens. Compared to the standard lens of the Rolleiflex camera Brandt had used for his documentary photographs, the Kodak allowed him, he wrote, to 'see like a mouse, a fish or a fly'. He first used it for photographing nudes in interiors and then continued on the beaches of southern England and France. Later he used a Hasselblad with a Superwide-angle lens."

http://www.vam.ac.uk/content/articles/b/working-methods-bill-brandt/