Excellent Spectator Paul Delany Bill Brandt a life

'Superb...Paul Delany has undertaken n difficult task
in writing about such an evasive, recessive personality,
who left few letters, told many lles and was fundamen-
tally uncommunicative. But this elegantly composed
biography is a fine achievement, candid yet unprurient,
which weaves the threads of life and art into a richly
textured fabric!'
Rupert Christiansen, Literary Review
Bill Brandt,the greatest of British photographers and the man
who visually defined the English identity in the mid-twentieth
century, was an enigma. Shy and complex, his life (prior to his
arrival in England and the publication of his first book The
English at Home in 1936) placed him at the centre of European
artistic currents which were to shape his subsequent vrision
and equip him with the means to portray 'Englishness' uanlike
any photographer before him, and perhaps unlike any who
have followed.
After his death in 1983, Brandt left a complicated trail behind
him. In this first critical biography of Brandt, Paul Delany
ambitiously traces his early background from a merchant's
family in Hamburg and a period in a Davos TB sanatorium to
an apprenticeship in a photographic studio in Vienna in the
Twenties, where he met and photographed Ezra Pound and
also underwent psychoanalysis; from his travels in Spain in the
Thirties to his brief period in the Paris studio of Man Ray
and reveals how biographical facts and the fantasies that
accompanied them deeply affected Brandt's work. Richly
illustrated with duotone reproductions of his masterpieces and
a number of unpublished private photographs, Bill Brandt's
mystery is unravelled in this illuminating account.
'In Delany, [Brandt] has found a fine biographer: well
informed in photographic and political history, a lucid
prose stylist...[an] excellent book'
Kevin Jackson, Sunday Times

2004
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