1936
The English at Home - (London: B. T. Batsford)
The Hyman Collection includes several photographs that relate to Bill Brandt's important first book, The English at Home (1936), which was published less than two years after his arrival in London. As well as vintage prints of photographs included in the book the collection also includes rare pictures that were not published.
1938
A Night in London (London: Country Life).
Bill Brandt's second book, A Night in London, was published in 1938. Insired by Brassai's Paris by Night, it charts the city's nocturnal activities from dawn to dusk. It would also provie a platform for Brandt's wartime photographs of London lit by moonlight.
1942
Britain at War - Published in Lilliput Magazine, London.
The Hyman Collection includes vintage prints that capture Brandt's activities as a war photographer on the Home Front, including photographs of people sheltering from the bombs in the London Underground, London at Night and Bomb damage. A selection of Brandt's photographs of the Underground shelters, principally from November 1940, was first published in Lilliput magazine in December 1942, alongside the Shelter drawings of Henry Moore in a feature that began with Brandt's photograph of Henry Moore, the actual print of which is in the Hyman Collection.
1948
Camera in London - (London: The Focal Press)
Camera in London was Bill Brandt's third book. Published by Focal Press in 1948 it largely consisted of images that Brandt had previously published in his first two books, The English at Home (1936) and London at Night (1948), as well as on assignments for publications such as Lilliput and Picture Post. New commentaries were provided by Norah Wilson and Brandt provided new groupings and often new titles. At the end of the book, for the specialist photography publisher, Brandt also included technical notes on every picture such as camera, length of exposure and weather conditions. The celebrated scene of St Pauls at night, for example, is recorded as having been photographed in moonlight with an exposure time of 15 minutes.
1951
Literary Britain - (London: Victoria and Albert Museum)
1961
Perspective of Nudes - (New York: Amphoto Publishing)
In 1961 Bill Brandt published one of his most important books, Perspective of Nudes and from that point on his nudes became amongst his most famous and acclaimed works. The Hyman Collection contains several nudesfrom this publication as well as others that are almost unknown to allow one to trace the evolotuon of this aspect of Brandt's work.
One starting point is provided by one of Brandt's most extraordinary early pictures, a close-up crop of his famous scene of a bedroom in Soho, which reduces the forms of an embracing man and woman into an abstraction that is transformed into a sensual masterpiece about contact and congress as the forms merge into one and the foregounded hand empahsises the tactile. The photograph anticipates the voluptous fragmentation of the body parts of Brandt's later nudes, in which the setting is also removed to concentrate attention on the human form.
1982
Portraits - (London: Gordon Fraser)