"One day in a second-hand shop near Covent Garden, I found a 70 year old wooden Kodak. I was delighted. Like nineteenth-century cameras it had no shutter, and the wide-angle lens, with an aperture as minute as a pin-hole, was focused on infinity. In 1926, Edward Weston wrote in his diary “The camera sees more than the eyes, so why not make use of it”. My new camera saw more and saw it differently. It created a great illusion of space, an unrealistically steep 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."
~ Bill Brandt
(1904-1983)
This is Bill Brandt’s most sought after image. His printing style varied greatly and like all creative, analogue photographers he had good days and bad days in the darkroom. When I found this print recently I knew that it had been produced not on one of his “good” days but on one of his truly “great” days. The print just glowed and the magic of the image affected me more than any other print of it I had seen over several decades. The collector instinct in me was just so overwhelming. The subject matter of the female body is one of the most primal themes in all of art history. It is of course from where we all originated.
