Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/603732
44 Bill Brandt was born in Hamburg, Germany on 3 May 1904, into a wealthy family of bankers and merchants. He spent his early years in Germany, and then, as he suffered from tuberculosis, at sanatoria in Switzerland and Austria. He moved to London in 1933. Brandt's early work was a mixture of photojournalism for magazines such as Picture Post, and personal photographic projects were published as books including The English At Home (1936), and London At Night (1938). Both as a photojournalist and an Anglophile, Brandt was drawn to the British class system, and much of his work highlights its inequalities during the inter-war years. He also became particularly well known during the Second World War, for his images of Londoners sheltering from the Blitz in Underground stations. From the mid 1940s, Brandt's work changed dramatically, as he concentrated almost exclusively on the female nude for the remainder of his career. With an eye that was drawn in equal measure to Surrealism, photojournalism and conceptual art, Brandt has been recognised as one of the most influential and important British photographers of the twentieth century. Brandt died in London on 20 December 1983. Bill Brandt 1904-1983 Signed Silver gelatin print, printed circa 1975 15 x 12 inches 23 Bill Brandt, Parlourmaid and Under-Parlourmaid Ready to Serve Dinner, 1936 Brandt staged this scene of a parlourmaid and her junior in his uncle's house. The photograph appeared in his first book, The English at Home (1936), which cast a satirical look over the social divide and notions of English propriety. Brandt wanted the scene to appear obviously staged in order to highlight the theatricality of English social customs. In his introduction to Brandt's book, Raymond Mortimer said that the photographer 'shows himself not only to be an artist but an anthropologist. He seems to have wandered about England with the detached curiosity of a man investigating the customs of some remote and unfamiliar tribe. And his illustrated report brings home very amusingly the variety and importance in England of clothes.' The photograph is now considered a turning point in the history of documentary photography in its self-conscious construction and cutting critique of social etiquette.