Bill Brandt

Brandt printed dark and hard. Whether showing a coal searcher pushing his bicycle across a slag heap in the north of England, Londoners bedding down in air-raid shelters during the Blitz, as in this 1940 commission for the Ministry of Information, or, after the war, distorted nudes on East Sussex beaches shot with a wide-angle police camera, he pushed contrast in the darkroom until the pictures feel like dreams or film noir. He trained briefly in Man Ray's Paris studio, and for his books The English at Home and A Night in London he often posed relatives and friends, staging scenes that look candid.