Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light is the first full-scale examination of Brandt’s oeuvre that attempts to trace a coherent trajectory across the photographer’s multifaceted career. With 162 rich duotone reproductions made from the finest of the photographer’s vintage prints, this book seeks to lay out Brandt’s career in ‘all its unruly splendour,’ as Sarah Hermanson Meister writes in her introductory essay. Meister’s fresh scholarship and keen attention to the chronological developments of Brandt’s career – including, for the first time, an analysis of the dramatic evolution of Brandt’s printing techniques – shed new light on an artist long considered an enigma by art historians. A comprehensive survey of the work Brandt published during World War II in a number of popular illustrated magazines reveals the origins of some of his most remarkable postwar work, while a technical examination of the photographer’s often painstaking retouching techniques, accompanied by detailed illustrations, offers an intimate behind-thescenes look at the process that was critical to the ultimate impact of Brandt’s extraordinary photographs.


Sarah Hermanson Meister is a Curator in the Department of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York