http://www.slideshare.net/secret/fp8gyrGxA2JC4j

bill brandt fotos

http://www.slideshare.net/secret/fp8gyrGxA2JC4j

Landscape photography is a genre intended to show different spaces within the world, sometimes vast and unending, but other times microscopic.

Many landscape photographers show little or no human activity in their photos, striving to attain pure, unsullied landscapes that are devoid of human influence, using instead subjects such as strongly defined landforms, weather, and ambient light. Despite this, there is no pure or absolute definition of what makes a landscape in photography, as such it has become a very broad term, encompassing urban, industrial, macro and nature photography. A beach full of parasols and sunbathers can be a landscape photo, but so can the view through an electron microscope, which shows a different type of landscape. Waterfalls, and mountains are especially popular in classic landscape photography, often calling for Large Format cameras and neutral density or polarizing filters. Though many photographs are inspired by traditional landscape painting, the term in photography is very broad, most places and things can be photographed as a landscape, a kitchen, a lamp, a wall, or even the human body can be turned into a rolling vista by a skilled photographer.

Landscapes are often created with such tools as a pinhole camera, or a large format camera and tripod, usually with a wide angle lenses (24 mm and 35 mm are especially popular). Many serious photographers use medium or large format systems to record as much detail as possible, although the vast majority of landscapes shot today are from digital SLRs and compact cameras.

Landscape photography has become a valuable tool to inspire environmental stewardship. Capturing the beauty of unspoiled places serves to bring dwindling wilderness areas into the public eye. Many noted landscape photographers provide images to environmental protection organizations. Noted organizations use professional and amateur photographers’ work to further the preservation cause. Notable landscape photographers include Ansel Adams, Bill Brandt, and Edward Weston.

wikipedia.org

Meadows and his Free Photographic Omnibus

An interview with photographer

Daniel Meadows…

Ask Daniel Meadows where he is from and he will reply, “I really don’t know. Except that I am English.” His work as a photographer over the years has documented England at its most real, whether it was touring the country on a Double Decker bus in the 70s and taking portraits of the people he saw, or photographing Ian Curtis and Joy Division in 80s Manchester during their rise to fame…

Meadows was born in Gloucestershire in 1952. He studied at photography at Manchester Polytechnic from 1970-73. Interesting projects from that time include The Shop On Greame Street in 1972  as well as collaborations with renowned observational photographer Martin Parr with Butlin’s By The Sea in Yorkshire in 1972 and June Street in Salford in 1973.

In 1973 and ‘74 Meadows, a self-confessed hippy, started his Free Photographic Omnibus. As Meadows puts it himself, “Once upon a time I lived in a double-decker bus, reg. JRR 404, better known as the Free Photographic Omnibus. She was my home, my travelling darkroom and gallery. We were an unlikely couple; she with her crash gear box and temperamental ways, me with my bushy hair and homemade flares. But we got along okay and, during 1973 and ‘74, we travelled about making a national portrait of the English. We covered 10,000 miles shooting pictures and giving them away.”

Some of Meadows' Photobus portraits in 1973 & '74

The free spirit of the 1970s meant that Meadows didn’t take a record of who he was photographing; no name, no age, no location. Just a photograph for them, and a photograph for his own archive. Which was unproblematic until 25 years later when Meadows decided he wanted to find his previous subjects and re-photograph them for his book The Bus.

Famous for not only taking photographs for Joy Division’s album artwork, Meadows has also been celebrated for taking a rare, albeit accidental, shot of Margaret Thatcher’s handbag and untidy office at No. 10 in the 80s. Yet these days, Meadows says that he no longer takes any photographs. His work now lies in the world of research, with particular focus on the ways of exploring the depth and range of his photography archive through storytelling using multimedia. He was awarded his PhD in 2005 for his innovative work with photography and participatory media.

Meadows was the creative director of the BBC’s Capture Wales Digital Storytelling project from 2001 until 2006, a project which has been described as “the most ambitious of all the BBC’s user generated content offerings”. Not only is the method of Digital Storytelling a brilliant way for Meadows to showcase his archive of photographs, it also allows access to a more personal world where photographs can take on a new life and meaning.

A photograph that was used Meadow's exhibition There's No Such Thing As Society...

When Meadows gave his lecture on Digital Storytelling last week, I knew I wanted to interview him within the first 5 minutes when he showed a video featuring a beautiful Rolleiflex camera. Considering that Meadows is an award-winning documentarist and photographer, and has hung out with some of England’s finest musical talent, he seemed completely humble and, well normal. He says that he enjoys looking at other peoples’ photographs more than his own, quotes Bob Dylan in an American drawl, and was not at all patronizing when I had to take a photograph of him, with my far inferior camera skills. In fact he seemed genuinely interested in my Polaroid camera, and wanted to watch the photograph spring to life. As you’d expect, his office is wall-to-wall with photographs (some his own, some not) and photography books, and during the interview he was constantly moving from shelf to shelf to illustrate his answers with photographic evidence. He even has the souvenir books that he bought at a Bill Brandt exhibition in 1970 when he was just 18 and beginning his interest in photography…

10am Wednesday 11, 2009.

H: I’ll start at the beginning. What attracted you to photography in the first place, and was it something that you always wanted to do?

Daniel Meadows today...

D: “It wasn’t something I always wanted to do. There were two really big events I think.  Well there were three actually. One was that I was crap at everything at school. And if you were crap you were allowed to do art. You know, our education system is so bad that instead of encouraging you to be creative from the moment you enter school, they discourage it. So creativity was the idiots’ class. So when I failed exams they ended up putting me in the art class. Then they discovered I couldn’t paint, so they said why don’t you try photography, cos it’s kind of easy. The second thing was I saw a wonderful little film, a BBC Omnibus in 1968 called Beautiful Beautiful and there was a New York photographer called Bruce Davidson, he’s on Magnum photography, and he did a project called East 100 Street which is in Harlem. And we’d all been led to believe that Harlem was big, bad and dangerous, and, you know, full of black people. And here was this white middle-class Jewish man, with a huge view camera, play camera, photographing people in their homes. And he made beautiful pictures, and he said something that stuck in my head, which is, ‘I poise, not pose, people… People have an innate dignity and they will set themselves before the camera in a dignified way. And they will choose what they will give.’ I remember thinking, ‘Ah this is a different way of working. I like this.’  And the third thing, there was a very famous British photographer called Bill Brandt, who’s dead now, who’d been brought up in Germany but lived in England. He is one of the greats. And there was a big retrospective exhibition of his work in 1970 at the Haywood gallery, and I went there on a school outing when I was 18. And I remember thinking ‘Wow photography’s wonderful.’ He made these wonderful documentary pictures around Great Britain from the 30s onwards. What was lovely about Brandt was that he did documentary pictures which I loved very much, but he also did portraits. He did nudes; I thought that was pretty exciting. If you take photographs you get a passport to do all sorts of things, you meet famous people, women take their clothes off for you, and you get to study the world we live in and for me at 18 that seemed pretty exciting.”

H: Was it Bill Brandt then who inspired you to do the Photobus project then? The fact that he’d gone around documenting Great Britain?

D: “Well the inspiration for the Photobus was more Cliff Richard, I hate to say. How tacky is that? There was a film, probably the first film I ever saw, Cliff Richard, 1960 Actually it wasn’t the first film I saw, the first film was Snow White. But one of the first films I saw was Cliff Richard in Summer Holiday. It was 1961 and I was nine. Or it could have been 63 when I was 11. And he lived on a Double Decker bus. So I guess it was a mixture of that, of Cliff and Brandt and Bruce Davidson. But also the other missing connection there is this guy called Sir John Benjamin Stone who was a Tory MP in the Edwardian era who travelled England and tried to make a record of the English. He travelled about and he did lots of portraits, cos he was an MP he had an ‘in’ to photographing famous people. He was photographing major events. But his real enthusiasm was for dying, fading, disappearing, rustic festivals and so on, and there’s this picture Harvest Home Kern Baby of 1901. You could look at this picture for a million years and you’d never fathom what it is about. One of the things I really, really love about photography is that it describes things perfectly and it explains nothing. And that’s what I love about photography. There’s always some mystery. And so for me those two things are the things I learnt from Stone.”

Then and Now... Meadows re-photographed his Photobus subjects once he found them 25 years later...

H: Do you think you’d still be able to do something like the Photobus today?

D: “No. The Criminal Justice Act in, was it 1980? The one that the Tories brought in to beat the Crusties, makes it almost impossible. I mean the gypsies and travelers are given a very hard time. I mean it was hard enough living in a bus, parking up and so on in 1973 and 74. You wouldn’t be able to do that now.  It’s not possible in the modern world.”

H: Did it take you a long time to embrace digital photography?

D: “I was a very early adopter of digital storytelling. I ran a digital storytelling class here for undergraduates in the mid to late 90s and people thought it was pretty wacky. And when I first started teaching you lot, you know, mainstream journalists, about the coming of the digital age, we were very unpopular. I mean you were all very welcoming last week, but 10 years ago I used to get, you know, people used to complain, ‘Why are we having to learn all this rubbish?’ I was a very early adopter of all of that stuff. But, for me, the digital age is ultimately not about technology. Photography has always changed; every five minutes there are new innovations and there have been throughout the history of photography. So photographers are used to embracing innovation, which I guess it why I was kind of into it a bit early. But it actually wasn’t the photographic side of things that excited me, so much as the fact that we had some new tools that looked like opening out media to become a much more democratic activity. So that was, for me, the thing that I really liked about it, that you could tell your own stories and publish them and didn’t have to go through the filter of patronizing big media professionals who basically were setting themselves up as gatekeepers. And I would still argue that that is the case. We have too many commissioning editors and people in the way between good ideas and good television.”

Ian Cutis photographed by Meadows in Manchester, January 1980.

H: What’s been your favourite photography project of your own over the years?

D: “I did love doing digital storytelling at the BBC. Every time you ran a workshop, people would bring their photographs in, you had such a window onto other peoples lives, and for me that was kind of humbling, but also very exciting and intriguing. And I began to enjoy looking at other peoples’ pictures more than I enjoyed making new pictures myself. There are pictures that are a fantastic trigger to memory; you can learn to listen to people. A photograph is a great place to begin listening to people. If that doesn’t sound bizarre!

H: Has there been anyone in particular who has been your favourite to photograph?

D: “No, but I can think of some people I really hated photographing!  The problem with doing anything out on a limb is that you have to finance it. And whilst in the early days I did manage to get a bit of funding from the Arts Council when I did my bus project, most the projects I’ve done, I’ve just gone and done them, and then tried to sell them to get some money.  Throughout the 70s I was thinking up stories like the mental hospital story, and going and doing them and then selling them to magazines. But when I started having children and I needed more stable income I had a long period working in the film industry as a stills man, taking pictures in the film industry. And there were some actors who were just bizarre. They’d stand and pose in front of the video cameras all day, then when I’d come on, I’d be sent off the set. They’d do silly things, like when they were rehearsing, which is when you could get your pictures if you were intelligent and you’d work with the actor rather than against them. You could say to them, ‘Well I think we could probably get the stills during the rehearsal, but make certain you’re wearing the right costumes.’ And then John Thaw- Inspector Morse- I did some stills for him, he would come out carrying a newspaper and rehearse with a newspaper in his pocket, or he’d put a hat on that wasn’t in character, just because he couldn’t stand the stills man. And Alec Guinness always had me sent off the set when I worked on the film of Little Dorrit in the 80s. I’d always rather liked Alec Guinness’ acting but I have to say he was a very difficult person to work with.”

Joy Division photographed by Meadows in Manchester, January 1980.

H: Would you mind telling me about your experiences in the Factory Records days?

D: “Factory Records! Well, for a period in the 70s I worked as a researcher in television and even then, it’s quite interesting now when I look back at the experiments with photographs. There’s a little film I made where I work as a kind of TV reporter reporting on my own photographs as events, which is very like a digital story. Anyway, so I went to work as a researcher at Grenada TV and, you know, I learned a lot about how television was made, which was later extremely useful when I came to doing digital storytelling. Grenada had big open plan offices and for a whole, well one long summer I shared a desk with Tony Wilson. Well I mean the desk had about 13 or 15 people all around it and Tony Wilson was one of the people around that desk. He was then a presenter on Granada Reports, and I was working on an arts program called Celebration. And it’s difficult for you lot to imagine it, but television was just as difficult to get into in those days, but it was incredibly over-manned. You could sit around all week doing very little, then suddenly the bit you had to do you’d have to do it very well. There were far too many people, and the unions were very, very strong, and as we well know there’s a whole trade union history of what happened with that. And so there were times when Wilson and I were sitting around twiddling our thumbs and he knew about my ventures on the bus and stuff and knew I was a photographer. In fact I carried a camera around with me all the time, or camera bag all the time with several cameras in it. And he just used to say ‘Come on Daniel, I’ve got a new band or a new act’ or this or that, you know, and the arts program I was working on made a little film about the Factory shortly after it opened, Factory Nights Down In Hulme. So I went and photographed and made a documentary about John Cooper Clarke. I loved John Cooper Clarke. I still love him. And then Joy Division were getting going and he needed some pictures for Joy Division and stuff… “

H: You did some of their album artwork as well didn’t you?

D: “It’s difficult for your generation to imagine how kind of crap it all was. You know, you live in an age of digital artwork and stuff, with things produced to a very high standard, but at that time Wilson had really good ambitions for the style of Factory Records, that they should be well designed. And he used this young guy called Peter Saville to do all the design. But Wilson was also hugely informed by the Situationists, the French avant-garde movement. And one of his bands was called Durutti Column, whose name came from a Situationist group. The original Situationists, they were kind of radical freedom fighters in the Spanish civil war who basically went around killing the bourgeoisie. I mean they weren’t very pleasant! Anyway, there was a sweet little guitar player called Vini Reilly who was in Durutti Column, and he wasn’t very well, he had some depressive illness and he was physically very unwell. But he played this sweet, kind of angelic guitar, and Wilson thought it would be amusing to have a sandpaper record sleeve.  I went down to Wilbraham Road, Wilson’s partner in Factory had a flat down there, and I went to photograph Vini Reilly, for I think it was Sounds magazine, when the return of the Durutti Column album came out. I photographed him mainly downstairs, in the garden and in the porch by the house, and then upstairs were several of the members of Joy Division sitting around gluing together these sandpaper albums.  The Situationists produced not only a book but also a magazine that had sandpaper covers. And the idea was that it would destroy everything around it, so they made an album with sandpaper covers. I still have mine somewhere. But I actually glued one or two together that afternoon. But you know we were just young people sitting around, making things. And it became quite a legendary album, a) because it was a good album, and b) it talked about what Wilson was trying to do with Factory. I photographed Joy Division in the studio, and photographed them at a gig in Oldham, so yeah it was an interesting time.”

Joy Division producer Martin Hannett, photographed by Meadows in Manchester, January 1980.

H: Have you found that observing people and places through photography has taught you anything about people and places that ordinary people wouldn’t necessarily see?

D: “Well, as Dylan used to say ‘It depends what you mean by all those terms, man.’  Ordinary!” (Laughs a lot)

H: Ha, Sorry I know ordinary is a bad choice of word…

D: (More laughter) “No it’s not a bad choice of word. It’s a very good choice of word, I’ve been guilty myself of using the word ‘ordinary’. So it depends what you mean by all those terms, man. But obviously I’ve learnt a lot. I think the thing I’ve learnt most is how bad we are at listening to people. Journalists from big media tend to make their mind up what the story’s about before they go and shoot it and that’s a sadness to me because what it doesn’t allow for is serendipity, and surprise and wonder. The more I spend time with ordinary people, man, the more I realise how wonderful we are, and watching television today makes me think how crap we are. And in that gap is the place where I do my work. You know, I have such an intolerance for reality-based television, I mean it’s shite with a capital S. And it’s as though we can’t do anything now on TV without it having a reality element. And it’s shite cos it’s cruel, its fundamentally based on a cruelty that people are set against each other. It’s like the entertainment of the playground, we’re all gathering around to watch an execution that can be picked over by a media that’s gradually losing credibility. You know fewer people are watching television programmes. Like if a television programme gets five million viewers, the makers go ‘Hey we had five million viewers’. But I say wait a minute, we live in a country of 60 million people, that means 55 million people had the intelligence not to watch your crap programme… “

To find out more about Daniel Meadows, have a look at his website www.photobus.co.uk or his Cardiff University profile…

All photographs have been used courtesy of Daniel Meadows…

When I arrived in Glasgow I had this persistent feeling that I wanted to shoot photographs of people on the street. I did not know how to go about it; it was just this amorphous sentiment that hung around in my mind, a shade, a thought of a thought. I was much too shy and lacked the requisite courage to shoot strangers.

Around this time, Totz pointed me in the direction of Street Photography for the Purist by Chris Weeks. Although Chris Weeks stipulated a lot of things that I’m not even sure I can follow at any time in my life, I felt that I understood when he exhorted one to develop the eye of a spy, a ghost. That, together with reading wikipedia and the Street and Documentary forum in photo.net helped me to imagine myself in the street, shooting.

Now I’m reading Bystander: A History of Street Photography by Colin Westerbeck and Joel Meyerowitz and I am educated even more. From the Introduction:

” … For the most part, however, the photographers discussed in these pages have tried to work without being noticed by their subjects. They have taken pictures of people who are going about their business unaware of the photographer’s presence. They have made candid pictures of everyday life in the street. That, at its core, is what street photography is.”

” … The street as it is defined here might be a crowded boulevard or a country lane, a park in the city or a boardwalk at the beach, a lively cafe or a deserted hallway in a tenement, or even a subway car or the lobby of a theater. It is any public place where a photographer could take pictures of subjects who were unknown to him and, whenever possible, unconscious of his presence.”

I thought it might be a good idea to make a “brief history of street photography”; something I can come back to from time to time to remind myself of the great men and women who made me want to do even just a tiny fraction of what they did. They have scaled the lofty heights I aspire to, hopefully for as long as I am able.

Nicephore Niepce (1765–1833) invented photography.

Louis Daguerre (1787–1851) invented the daguerreotype.

William Fox Talbot (1800–1877) invented the talbotype.

Rev. Calvert Jones (1804-1877)

Charles Marville (1816-1879)

Charles Negre (1820–1880)

Felix Bonfils (1831-1885)

John Thomson (1837–1921)

Eugene Atget (1857–1927)

Charles Van Schaick (1852-?)

Berenice Abbott (1898–1991)

Alfred Stieglitz (1864–1946)

Chusseau Flaviens (?-?)

Count Giuseppe Primoli (1851-1927)

E.J. Constant Puyo (1857–1933)

Dallett Fuguet (?-?)

Felice Beato (1833-1907)

Paul Strand (1890–1976)

Joseph Byron (1847-1923) and Percy Byron (1878–1959)

Frank Sutcliffe (1853–1941)

Thomas Annan (1829-1887)

Lewis W. Hine (1874–1940)

Jacques Henri Lartigue (1894–1986)

Alice Austen (1866–1952)

Andre Kertesz (1894–1985)

Jacob Riis (1849-1914)

Ralph Steiner (1899–1986)

Robert Doisneau (1912-1994)

Brassai (1899–1984)

Roger Mayne (b. 1929)

Bill Brandt (1904–1983)

Henri Cartier-Bresson (1908–2004)

Lucien Aigner (1901–1999)

Kurt Hutton (1893-1960)

Manuel Alvarez Bravo (1902–2002)

Josef Koudelka (b. 1938)

Roman Vishniac (1897–1990)

Aaron Siskind (1903-1991)

Dorothea Lange (1895–1965)

Ben Shahn (1898–1969)

Helen Levitt (1913–2009)

Max Yavno (1911-1985)

Dan Weiner (1919-1959)

Walker Evans (1903–1975)

Morris Engel (1918 – 2005)

Weegee (1899–1968)

Marjory Collins (1912-1985)

John Vachon (1914–1975)

Lisette Model (1901–1983)

Louis Faurer (1916-2001)

Rene Burri (b. 1933)

Lee Friedlander (b. 1934)

William Klein (b. 1928)

Robert Frank (b. 1924)

Garry Winogrand (1928–1984)

Joel Meyerowitz (b. 1938)

Tod Papageorge (b. 1940)

John Gutmann (1905-1998)

Ray Metzker (b. 1931)

Harry Callahan (1912–1999)

Diane Arbus (1923–1971)

Raghubir Singh (1942-1999)

Jindrich Streit (b. 1946)

Jeff Mermelstein (b. 1957)

Viktor Kolar (b. 1941)

Elliott Erwitt (b. 1928)

Daido Moriyama (b. 1938)

Tom Arndt (b. 1944)

Bruce Gilden (b. 1946)

Richard Kalvar (b. 1944)

Bryn Campbell

Nils Jorgensen

Nick Turpin (b. 1969)

Jeffrey Ladd (b. 1968)

Gus Powell (b. 1974)

Chris Weeks

Edmund Leveckis

Orville Robertson

grant .

Ko-ji Yamasaki

Tod Gross

Alan Dejecacion

Robert Vincent

Tony Remington

Luis Liwanag

I run the Brighton Photographers Group (BPG) . I set it up six months ago to keep my creative juices flowing whilst I developed my Photographic Business. For me it has been a great support and inspiration. I have met some lovely people and picked up some excellent tips along the way.

Each month the group collectively decides upon a brief to do. The task for June was to take some images in the style of a inspirational photographer. One of my own personal favourites is Bill Brandt and his various collections of nudes. I can’t quite fathom my fascination for his images. When I am taking nude and semi-nude images, I am often seeking to capture  images  I find uncomfortable. They may be less than flattering or somewhat distorted. Creatively I think its almost a liberation for my own image hang-ups (but maybe I just like wierdness).

Now this is not to say that I only see Bill Brandt’s images as wierd. I also find the lines and light he captures beautiful and fluid (both things I endeavour to capture in my own work). So anyway enough writing. Below you will find a variety of images inspired by his work. Some of the images are self portraits I have taken whilst hand holding the camera.

Enjoy!

Christinax

Resting Landscape

Self Portrait on a timer

Body from a different era

Flamingo

Mollie

Body Parts

The Belgian surrealist artist, René Magritte became well known for a number of witty and thought-provoking images, which he described as ”visible images which conceal nothing; they evoke mystery and, indeed, when one sees one of my pictures, one asks oneself this simple question, ‘What does that mean?’. It does not mean anything, because mystery means nothing either, it is unknowable.” Psychoanalysts attributed this back and forth play with reality to the early death of his mother and his ‘mother is alive’ ‘mother is dead’ schools of thought. 

Like Magritte, Bill Brandt–the photographer of this picture–would have preferred to hide behind his pictures, and be the original faceless creator. As a photographer, Bill Brandt was famous for his contrasted images of class society in The English at Home (1936), his Blitz picture, for his dark landscapes, for the disturbing distortions in hisPerspective of Nudes and for his secrecy. His photos of Peter Sellers, Magritte and Harold Pinter are famous.

The painting in the picture is not Magritte’s famed The Son of Man, but one of many bowler hat variations he painted over his life. The Great War. 1966. 

Board a Manhattan-bound Q or B train from DeKalb Avenue in Brooklyn (or on weekends, currently due to constructions, the R train runs on this track as well) and look out the right side just before the train emerges out of the tunnel onto Manhattan Bridge.

You’ll see a unique and playful piece of urban art: an underground zoetrope (“a device that produces an illusion of action from a rapid succession of static pictures”). This is one of my favorite “hidden” treasures of New York City.

Created in the 1970s by Bill Brandt and titled “Masstransiscope,” it fell into disrepair before being restored in November 2008 with no formal announcement.

The first time I noticed Masstransiscope, I thought it was just graffiti, but I was puzzled by why it was so brightly lit. And then when it registered that this “graffiti” was “alive” and moving with a specific intent, my brain exploded. I consider it a real treat that this is a frequent sighting in my regular commute and it never gets old. Vast majority of the people on the train never notice, but occasionally after the train passes this mass-transit zoetrope, I’ll make eye-contact with a stranger whose eyes too were caught by Masstransiscope and we smile as if we just shared a wonderful secret. The reaction of little kids to it is particularly awesome. They respond to it like Christmas. “Mommmmm! Looooook! It’s moving!!!!”

I’m almost hesitant to share a video of Brandt’s underground work because I don’t want to spoil it for you. I highly recommend everyone take this train to see it in person. That said, for my friends and readers who don’t live in New York City, here it is:

Plate 6: Close, No. 65 High Street. © Thomas Annan

Thomas Annan was a photographer who documented the narrow winding streets of Glasgow with a large format camera and the wet-collodion process. He was clearly a very skilled photographer, as he judged time of day as well as exposure times to give the most detail possible.  Due to long exposures, movement its blurred and people even appear invisible. It is this eerie emptiness which creates an uncertainty in the places depicted.
His appoach to photograph was relatively ’straight’, the composition would not vary between images, nor would the exposure. Also it appeared that people were not of great concern to him, as they are present in some an not in others. Either wayhe could of either had the pose, or asked them to move. His desires and aims were to mainly document the physicalities of the buildings, alike a surveyor would.

Policeman in a Dockland Alley, Bermondsey, Bill Brandt 1938 © Bill Brandt Archive Ltd.

This image I love, and think to be one of Brandts classic images. The control of light is superb in creating suspense.  The darkness we find ourselves lurking in, almost seems to suggest that we are avoiding the officer.  I really enjoy the film noir-esque feel to these images.

So this is taking me a little more to the presence of a person with the frame. Perhaps to create a narrative. I would also  like to shoot this project in black and white, although I think it would easily end up as just a repeat of what has already been done. At the moment im thinking slide film, to print digitally.

Aunque el blog haya cambiado ligeramente, el nombre y la cabecera, podéis estar muy seguros de que las míticas entradas de fotografía no cambiarán ni se perderán. Cuando empecé esta serie de entradas os comencé hablando de un fotógrafo muy criticado y provocador : Mapplethorpe. Hoy os vengo a presentar a otro fotógrafo muy dado también a la Fotografía del desnudo, especialmente del desnudo femenino, y que sin duda es uno de los grandes fotógrafos del siglo pasado.

Bill Brandt

Nació en 1904 en Hamburgo, su padre era británico y su madre alemana.Pasó la mayor parte de su vida en Inglaterra, por lo que se le considera un fotógrafo inglés.

Se interesa por la fotografía a partir de los 20 años, cuando todavía residía en Viena. Este gran maestro de la fotografía, optó por resaltar valores como la poesía, la justicia y el amor.

“Un fotógrafo debe poseer y conservar las facultades receptivas de un niño que mira el mundo por primera vez.”

Sus primeros trabajos son de fotoperiodismo, así en su primer libro ” The English at Home” (1936) , hace un análisis de la estructura social de los británicos, mostrando las diferencias sociales, las deprimentes condiciones de vidas de unas personas en contraste con las imágenes de la aristocracia inglesa.

En 1929 se muda a París donde trabajará como asistente de Man Ray, para trasladarse dos años después a Londres. Allí empieza su carrera como fotógrafo independiente. Durante este tiempo Brandt hace fotografías de grandes ciudades inglesas, en un momento en el que se apresura una crisis económica.

Al igual, en su segundo libro ” A Nigth in London ” ( 1938 ), siguiendo los pasos de Brassaï en su libro ” Paris de nuit ” ( 1933 ), hace una aproximación a las situaciones sociales de Londres, pero en esta ocasión se va dejando llevar por cierto aire de nostalgia.

Al final de los años 30, refleja con su cámara la condiciones de vida de los mineros del norte de Inglaterra, afectados por el paro.

Durante los años de la II Guerra Mundial, trabaja como fotógrafo para el Gobierno, mostrando la vida de los londinenses en el metro durante los bombardeos nocturnos.

Después de la guerra su estilo cambia rotundamente, deja progresivamente el reportaje, y comienza a fotografiar desnudos, retratos y paisajes.

En 1945, Brandt comienza a concentrarse en la investigación de las formas femeninas (el desnudo), utilizando para ello un gran angular que produce distorsiones en las imágenes, consiguiendo con este trabajo uno de los mayores logros en el desnudo femenino del siglo veinte.

Fuentes: 1, 2, 3, 4 …

Leer también otros artículos de fotografía:

Fotógrafos Famosos: Cecil Beaton

Fotógrafos famosos:Man Ray

Fotógrafos Famosos: Annie Leibovitz a través de Susan Sontag (I)

Fotográfos famosos: Annie leibovitz (II)

Fotógrafos Famosos: Henry Cartier Bresson

Fotógrafos Famosos: Robert Doisneau

Fotógrafos famosos: Edward Sheriff Curtis

Fotógrafos famosos : Julia Margaret Cameron

An impressive (free) exhibition of photo portraits by young photographers, photography students and gifted amateurs opens today at the National Portrait Gallery in London (where work by the American super-photographer Annie Leibovitz is coincidentally currently on display). There is something about good portrait photographs which I find eerily compelling, as they can give one an entry into the sitter’s soul. Amongst the most treasured volumes in my library are books of black-and-white prints by Bill Brandt, John Deakin and Richard Avedon, and the walls of my study are covered in signed, framed photos of people I have written about, including W H Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas and Oscar Wilde.

Over 2,500 people entered this year’s Taylor Wessing prize (sponsored by the European law firm of the same name). The winner was Lottie Davies, for her representation of a friend’s nightmare of giving birth to quintuplets, though I have to say I was more struck by Hendrik Kertstens’ ‘Bag’, a witty and evocative potrait of a young Dutch woman with a plastic bag on her head, shaped like a seventeenth-century cap, echoing Vermeer and other old Dutch masters. Kerstens was awarded the second prize. Otherwise, the images which really struck me were not those of beautiful young women (or indeed men), of which there were plenty, but the characterful lined faces of novelist Doris Lessing and sculptor Louise Bourgeois, and a chilling picture of an almost zombie-like Vladimir Putin.

The exhibition runs until 15 February and as often at the NPG, there is an accompanying book (NPG, £12.99), with a forward by Ben Okri and interviews with the prizewinners by Richard McClure.

Link: www.npg.org.uk

One of the many little perks of the theatre stuff we got involved with were invites to a couple of gallery openings. One was a display of local and UK artists, sculptors and pottery people

The other was the opening of a gallery of Bill Brandt’s work. He was a pioneering photographer of people and things the 1930’s to 1960’s. Stunning photos in black and white including some of the coast just along from Brighton; a series called “Nude, East Sussex” and a famous pic in this series is one of an ear on the beach.
From this point on you might notice me taking some back and white pics! You could say I was inspired, particularly in the bar later.
[pic in bar]
People, in places, doing their things, was his specialty. It sparked a heated discussion on when\if it was OK to take pictures of people without them knowing or agreeing.

Mujeres en Plural es el nombre de la fantástica exposición de fotografía que se puede disfrutar en la Fundación del Canal de Isabel II en Madrid, hasta el 4 de enero de 2009. Se trata de un repaso de la mujer a través de los grandes fotógrafos de siglo XX. La lista de autores  es enorme: Man Ray, Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank y muchísimos otros: desde fotógrafos de moda hasta reporteros gráficos pasando por artistas de la fotografía de fama mundial.

FRANK HORVAT – Givenchy Hat B. – 1958

DOROTHEA LANGE – Migrant Mother – 1936

La variedad de fotografías me dio que pensar ya que no encontré un criterio para el orden de las mismas (ni cronológico ni temático, ni siquiera alfabético por autores), pero he de decir que disfruté de imágenes verdaderamente hermosas, conmovedoras, impactantes y cotidianas. De todo un poco, desde elaboradísimos retratos hasta hermosísimas instantáneas. A pesar de tener alguna zona con la peor iluminación que he visto nunca para una exposición, os la recomiendo muchísimo. La vais a disfrutar.

La exposición, abierta hasta el 5 de octubre en la Sala de Exposiciones San Benito, merece la pena.

Es un fiel reflejo de las condiciones de vida de la clase obrera en Inglaterra en 1940.

Se dice que la intención del autor, en un principio, no era reivindicar las penurias de los trabajadores, aunque luego colaboró con una asociación que pretendía transformar las barriadas en ciudades-jardín.

Cada fotografía está muy cuidada, aunque por ser escenas familiares y cotidianas, no parezca así.

La Sala Municipal de Exposiciones San Benito acoge hasta el 5 de octubre la muestra de Bill Brandt ‘The Home’ compuesta por más de 60 imágenes que reflejan la vida cotidiana de los ingleses de 1930 y 1940.

Brandt fue uno de los primeros fotógrafos interesados en la estética industrial y en la clase trabajadora. Por su objetivo pasaron familias obreras de Londres, Birmingham, Sheffield y Halifax tanto en el interior de fábricas como en la intimidad.

El artista nació en 1904 en Hamburg (Alemania) y falleció en Londres en 1983.

La entrada a la sala es gratuita y el horario es de martes a domingo de 12 a 14 y de 18,30 a 21,30.

Por você

Foto - Bill Brandt

- Mais devagar, meu bem…

- Pra mim é melhor assim!

- Aí fica ruim para os dois.

- Quando a gente namorava,

você dizia que gostava.

Mentia?

- Não, eu não mentia;

me sacrificava por você!

  En el marco de PHOTOESPAÑA2008, en la sala de exposiciones BBVA de Madrid (Castellana, 81), podemos visitar la de BILL BRANDT, The Home, que se inauguró el pasado 3 de este mes de junio y terminará el 27 de julio próximo.

Las fotografías expuestas, tomadas en los años 30 en Inglaterra, dieron lugar a su primer libro, The English at home (Los ingleses en casa), publicado en 1936. Las obras proceden de distintas colecciones británicas públicas, como el Victoria and Albert Museum o el National Media Museum de Bradford, y de otras privadas. El comisario de la exposición, Paul Wombell, exdirector de la Photographer’s Gallery de Londres, hace la presentación, que cito textualmente, en el programa de mano:

“El autor germano-británico Bill Brandt está considerado una figura central de la fotografía inglesa. Durante más de cincuenta años desarrolló un amplio espectro de temas -paisajes, retratos, desnudos, escenas sociales- caracterizados por un expresivo uso de la luz y el espacio. Aunque Brandt trabajó durante un periodo de profundos cambios sociales, sus imágenes entrañan sobre todo intenciones de carácter estético.

The Home (El hogar) se centra en los inicios de la Inglaterra industrial, periodo que va desde finales de los años 30 hasta finales de los 40. Brandt es uno de los primeros fotógrafos en interesarse por la estética industrial, así como en retratar a la clase trabajadora. En más de 50 imágenes, fotografía a familias obreras de distintas ciudades inglesas en la intimidad y en contraste con el entorno que las rodea. Obviando cualquier discurso político o moralista, Brandt construye paisajes de edificios deslucidos con los que arropa al hombre, eje central de su arquitectura.

Bill Brandt (Hamburgo, 1904 – Londres, 1983), hijo de madre alemana y padre inglés, pasó su infancia y adolescencia entre Alemania, Suiza y Austria. Tras trabajar durante una temporada en el estudio parisino de Man Ray, Brandt se asentó en Inglaterra en 1931 y comenzó a trabajar como fotoperiodista. Durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial documentó los bombardeos nazis a la ciudad de Londres para el Ministerio Británico de Información. Su obra se recoge en diez publicaciones entre las que destacan Shadow of Light (1966) y Bill Brandt Nudes: 1945-1980 (1980).”

Unas breves líneas acerca de mi opinión personal de la exposición: las obras que he contemplado están cargadas de un enorme contenido social, y son de un realismo impresionante. Reflejan la vida y las condiciones de la revolución industrial, desde el ángulo de la gente de la clle, de los obreros, de los más desfavorecidos; en algunos momentos he tenido la impresión de que evocaban a los personajes de Dickens o de Zola. Aparte de su gran valor artístico y su carga estética, es evidente que serían una de las mejores fuentes de investigación antropológica o histórica, ya que ofrecen un valor inestimable para su estudio.

La conclusión es que se trata de una magnífica muestra, fundamentalmente por las obras expuestas, pero también se ha creado el ambiente propicio para poder disfrutar de ellas, sobrio y fácil de seguir, sin un exceso de paneles informativos, apenas los justos, constituyendo las fotografías en si mismas el objeto de deleite y reflexión. Hay que visitarla.

Gracias a un libro que mi novia adquirió en un viaje, me acerqué al trabajo del fotógrafo germano-británico Bill Brandt (1904-1983), autor de las célebres imágenes de la clase obrera inglesa y de la estética industrial de las primeras décadas del siglo pasado. Tras un largo periodo dedicado al fotoperiodismo, Brandt se enfocó (después) en los desnudos, los paisajes y el retrato; eso sí, desde un punto de vista donde destacan la sutileza y los encuadres poco convencionales.

[enlaces]
Portafolio de Bill Brandt
Fotos de Bill Brandt en PHotoEspaña 2008
Biografía de Bill Brandt

Bill Brandt

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comienza la feria del libro

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Ayer murió el señor Yves Saint Laurent, el único modisto que he comprendido y, lo que es más importante, me ha comprendido. 

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