When I went to art academy in the late seventies all my fellow students could talk about was the photography of Bill Brandt. There was so much being said about this German born British photographer that I decided not to bother having a closer look at his works, although they were hard to miss. They were everywhere, on posters, in books and on calendars.
I acted like most young wannabe artists, I tried to stay away from established art and spent my time looking for the Avant Garde. I found that in the works of Ralph Gibson. In 1982 I was lucky enough to be sent out to New York to interview photographers. Amongst them was Ralph Gibson who turned out to be a great admirer and a personal friend -- I believe -- of Bill Brandt.
Gibson was convincing enough (and I thought he was God, so that helped a lot) to make me have a closer look at Brandt’s works. For some reason his works, especially the nudes, seemed cold to me. The use of ultra wide angle lenses made me think Brandt’s works were superficial, or too technical in origin.
I was a snotty fool and I was wrong of course. Looking at his works over the last decade I completely changed my mind. Still, I missed out on the great Bill Brandt hype when it actually happened, so I was pleasantly surprised to find a four part interview on YouTube that I would like to share with you.
Interestingly enough Brandt is complaining about the fact that not many people liked his nudes, repeatedly described by him as his favorite works. These were the works I was most confronted with, not the countless very soft and well balanced compositions of people in their natural surroundings.
Now I can appreciate the nudes and I can see what impact they had on traditional nude photography, yet I still cannot completely shake off the feeling that the artificial perspective caused by the extreme wide angle camera that he never meant to use for this purpose in the first place, often harm his compositions more than they strengthen them.