Shadow and Light

Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light is the catalogue for the Museum of Modern Art's 2013 retrospective. It was the museum's first full reconsideration of Brandt's career since 1969, and the most comprehensive survey of his work assembled to date.

The book is edited and with an essay by Sarah Hermanson Meister, Curator in MoMA's Department of Photography. It draws on the museum's vintage-print holdings of Brandt, recently more than doubled, tracing a coherent trajectory across five decades of a career the photographer himself preferred to present in loose thematic groupings. It moves from his dark, socially pointed studies of English class life in the 1930s through his photojournalism for Lilliput and Picture Post. From there it takes in his wartime pictures of the London Blackout and Blitz shelters, shown here alongside the magazine assignments that produced them. It closes with the distorted, sculptural nude studies of his final decades. A second essay by conservator Lee Ann Daffner examines Brandt's own darkroom methods. The 208-page volume reproduces 254 images in tritone, on pages trimmed to echo the proportions of Brandt's photographs.

Brandt, born in Hamburg in 1904 and based in Britain from the early 1930s, is regarded as the country's foremost photographer of the twentieth century. His earlier books include The English at Home (1936), a study of class contrast, and A Night in London (1938), on the city after dark. Literary Britain (1951) surveyed landscapes associated with English writers. Perspective of Nudes (1961) introduced the wide-angle nude studies that became his best-known late work. He was also an accomplished portraitist, photographing writers and artists including Francis Bacon and Henry Moore.