Bill Brandt: The Nude As Landscape

As glamorous and sexy as the human body is, it is only a blank canvas until the artist creates his masterpiece. Whilst, photographers George Hurrell and David LaChapelle drew on familiar poses to create enticing images, Bill Brandt went a different way and created landscapes from nudes.

Bill Brandt's nudes actually comprise a fraction of his portfolio as he was also known as portraitist and photojournalist in the middle of 20th Century in England. He began his photography career in earnest around 1933 when he began to document the English urban life. He would continue this style of photojournalism well into World War II, documenting the bomb shelters of London for the British Government.

Eventually, Brandt focused more on portraiture and landscape as he saw that documentary photography was becoming more and more commonplace.

Brandt's work on the nude body was actually a response to the end of the war. Within 15 years, he had produced three books on the nude. Brandt's nudes however were vastly different from what everyone else at that time had done and indeed, even what most photographers and artists create today.

In many of his nudes, he uses wide angle lenses which are mostly used for landscape work as they take in more of the scenery before the photographer. When focused on the human body however, they create weird distortions which would be out of place in a usual portrait studio.

The first few distortions Brandt created were largely experimental, allowing the camera to record the scene with little involvement from the photographer. The later bodyscapes involved close-ups of the body which blended astonishingly well with the surrounding landscape.

The results of these distortions and close-ups are a series of wonderful landscapes of the body. The curves of the nudes are exaggerated to the point that they no longer represent the human body per se, but something wholly new and beautiful.