Bill Brandt

large-format, mounted, signed in ink on the mount, 1951

Estate of Valerie Lloyd

Christie's London, 5 May 2000, Sale 8747, Lot 338

Bill Brandt: Nudes 1945-1980 (Boston, 1980), pl. 8

Bill Brandt: Behind the Camera, Photographs 1928-1983 (Aperture, 1985), p. 66

Brandt: The Photography of Bill Brandt (New York, 1999), p. 247

Sarah Hermanson Meister, Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light (The Museum of Modern Art, 2013), cover and p. 150

Robert A. Sobieszek, Masterpieces of Photography from the George Eastman House Collections (New York, 1985), p. 321

Peter Lacey, The History of the Nude in Photography (New York, 1964), p. 180

Manfred Heiting, et al., At the Still Point: Photographs from the Manfred Heiting Collection, Volume II, Part 1 (Los Angeles and Amsterdam, 2000), p. 166

This large impressive early print is on double-weight, slightly warm matte-surface paper with black-inked edges. It is in generally excellent condition. The photograph is mounted to a heavy white modern board. In raking light, small deposits of original retouching are visible overall. The front and reverse of the mount are lightly soiled, and there are tape and paper remnants at the top and lower edges on the reverse. When examined under ultraviolet light, this print does not appear to fluoresce.
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In the 1983 documentary film about his life and work, Shadows from Light, Bill Brandt told filmmaker Stephen Dwoskin that the images for which he hoped to be remembered were his nude studies, of which the present photograph is one.  The model in Belgravia, London is likely Marjorie Beckett, Brandt’s long-time lover and later second wife. 

Brandt’s photographic explorations from 1945 to 1960 were predominantly conducted through his photographs of nudes.  An unlikely inspiration for this work came from the film Citizen Kane (a film which Brandt saw multiple times), specifically the wide-angle cinematography of Gregg Toland.  He told Dwoskin:  

‘When Citizen Kane was first shown, I’d never seen a film in which real rooms were used and you could see everything, the ceiling and terrific perspective, it was all there.  It was quite revolutionary, Citizen Kane, and I was very much inspired by it and I thought: I must take photographs like that.’ 

In the spring of 1944, Brandt discovered a 1931 fixed-focus Kodak Wide Angle (110°) camera for which he paid £5 in a second-hand shop near Covent Garden.  He recalled, 

‘My new camera saw more and it saw differently.  It created a great illusion of space and an unrealistically deep perspective, and it distorted.  When I began to photograph nudes, I let myself be guided by this camera, and instead of photographing what I saw, I photographed what the camera was seeing.  I interfered very little, and the lens produced anatomical images and shapes which my eyes had never observed’ (The Photography of Bill Brandt, p. 233). 

The curator and scholar Valerie Lloyd (1945–1999), from whose estate this photograph comes, had a wide and varied career in photography, music, and contemporary visual arts.  Her formal introduction to photography began as a student in the history of photography at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque; she then went on to work in the curatorial department of film at the National Portrait Gallery, London, and in 1978 became the curator of the Royal Photographic Society in London.  In 1981, she organized one of the first major retrospectives of the work of Bill Brandt, the inaugural show of the Royal Photographic Society’s National Centre of Photography at its new location in Bath.  She contributed essays to volumes on a range of photographic topics, from Roger Fenton and Soviet photography to Vogue magazine covers and photographic processes.  Her 1976 catalogue for the dealer Colnaghi & Co.’s Photography: The First Eighty Years is still among the very best of its kind.