Boca Raton, FL - British master photographer Bill Brandt’s wide ranging work is explored in a comprehensive exhibition, Bill Brandt: A Retrospective, on view at the Boca Raton Museum of Art from June 28 through August 27, 2006.

From Brandt’s early work that documents fixed social contrasts of pre-World War II life in Britain to his later experimentation with a surreal style, this exhibition spans 50 years of Brandt’s far reaching career in an extensive assemblage of 155 vintage gelatin silver prints from the Bill Brandt Archive in London.  Brandt’s vision, unconfined by easy categories, extends from photojournalism to moody, atmospheric landscapes to stark, revealing portraiture to high-contrast nudes, distorted with very wide-angle lenses.

Brandt (British, b. Germany 1904-1983) once wrote, “Photography is still a very new medium and everything is allowed and everything should be tried.”  Although driven by historic periods and events, Brandt’s endless invention and continual search for ways to expand the medium makes his work fresh and timeless.  So strong was his presence during the middle of the twentieth century that histories of photography often imply that he was the only photographer in Britain during that period. 

“No other British photographer has made so many memorable photographs as Bill Brandt.  He excelled in all fields –social scenes, Surrealism, night photography, wartime documentary, landscape, portraiture and the nude,” writes Mark Hayworth-Booth, curator at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

Brandt worked as Man Ray’s assistant in Paris in 1929 and returned to London in the 1930s to become a freelancer for the Weekly Illustrated.  Some of this work was later published as his first book, The English at Home.  In contrast with his contemporaries in Depression-era America, Brandt developed an expressive, high-key style that pushed

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