Perspective of nudes
By: Bill Brandt ; with a preface by Lawrence Durrell, and an introduction by Chapman Mortimer.
Publisher: Amphoto
Published: 1961
Place of publication: New York : Amphoto
Language: eng
Number of pages: 90
Subjects: Photography of the nude.
Description: "The series of nudes that Bill Brandt made between 1947 and 1960--brought to triumph fruition after he acquired an old wide-angle camera--is justly renowned. These startling images rewrote the language of nude photography in not one, but several quarters. Brandt's approach was primarily formal, but his own sensibilities, combined with photography's tendency to overwhelm form's purity with life's impurities, ensured that his nudes are as interesting for their psychological undertones as for the wealth of unexpected forms he conjured. He did so with a camera that was devoid of a practicable viewing mechanism and thus reduced him, in effect, to working by blind instinct. ... Brandt wrote that the photographer must teach himself to see with a child's curiosity, and this would seem to be the key. At close range, his ancient camera yields a Venusian giantism, where sometimes sharply defined, sometimes blurred mountains of flesh loom over the artist/observer. ... It seems fitting that Brandt, the most cosmopolitan of English photographers--Hampstead intellectual, avowed aficionado of Secessionist Vienna, and psychoanalytical subject--should make nudes that are so classically Freudian in character."--The Photobook : A History Volume I / Martin Parr and Gerry Badger. London : Phaidon, 2004.