Thursday, February 28, 2013

Photograph by Bill Brandt

Perhaps my favourite 20th century photographer of the female nude figure is Hamburg-born Brit (his father was British), 1904-1983, Bill Brandt. I have always been fascinated by his high-contrast distorted nudes that he took in the 60s and 70s. As much as I have admired him, have a look at his current MOMA show here, I have never been either influenced nor have I ever wanted to emulate his technique. We do know that he took most of his photographs with a 6x6 cm Rolleiflex but such is the distortion of some of his nudes that he might have had some other secret unrevealed to us to this day.


I have always treated my female nudes in the same way I would photograph a beautiful car. This means that I am careful not to change the relationship of the front of a car to its rear by getting close to the front with a wide angle lens. This would make the front end bigger in relation to the tail end. It is important to treat with respect the person who designed the car.


Bill Brandt endeavoured to go his own way in a style that has been his, with few being able to even get close in poor imitation.






The nudes you see here I took at the end of the 1970s. I was brand new to the experience of shooting nudes. I tried to respect form and even when I used an extreme wide angle as in the last shot here I was careful to render the body as I saw it.




But for reasons I will never know I did take some of a woman’s lovely bum in which I played with shapes and ignored my respect for the body and I cropped the shots with my camera with a determination that I never used again.