Bill Brandt was the preeminent British photographer of the twentieth century, a founding father of photography's modernist tradition whose half-century-long career defies neat categorization. This publication presents the photographer's entire oeuvre, with special emphasis on his investigation of English life in the 1930s and his innovative late nudes. The Museum of Modern Art has been exhibiting and collecting Brandt's photographs since the late 1940s, and has recently more than doubled its collection of vintage prints of his work, which forms the core of this selection. An essay by Sarah Hermanson Meister, Curator in the Department of Photography at MoMA, sets the artist's life and work in the context of twentieth-century photographic history. With rich duotone illustrations that highlight the special characteristics of Brandt's prints, this volume is an invaluable resource to students and scholars alike. Lee Ann Daffner, the Museum's Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Conservator of Photographs, contributes an illustrated glossary of Brandt's retouching techniques, enhancing the appreciation of Brandt's printing processes. The book also includes a generously illustrated appendix of Brandt's published photo-stories during the Second World War.
Bill Brandt (1904-1983) moved to London from Germany in 1934 and quickly began his investigation of British society, resulting in what would become his signature publications: "The English at Home" (1936) and "A Night in London" (1938). He continued to photograph in London throughout World War II, contributing regularly to "Picture Post" and "Harper's Bazaar." His postwar career expanded to include portraits and landscapes, and the celebrated series of nudes that remain his crowning achievement. His other major books include "Camera in London" (1948), "Literary Britain" (1951) and "Perspective of Nudes" (1961). Brandt died in London in 1983.

"OBJECT: PHOTO" contains brilliant photographs from the first half of the twentieth century--the most dynamic and radical period in the development of modern photography--but it explores them using a new approach: instead of privileging the content of the images, it shifts the dialogue to the photographic object--the actual, physical thing created by a particular artist using particular techniques at a precise time, surviving into the present with a unique history. This perspective provides new insight into the singular nature of each work and the density of references that each contains while also acknowledging the cultural importance of photography from the interwar period--as well as the rarity of its best examples. Recognition of this importance informed The Museum of Modern Art's acquisition, in 2001, of the 341 modernist photographs that now constitute the Thomas Walther Collection, each presented in this volume in special 5 color reproductions and accompanied by an unprecedented degree of detailed information, constituting new standards for the field. "OBJECT: PHOTO "represents the culmination of four years of research by the Museum's Departments of Photography and Conservation and by more than two dozen visiting scholars, demonstrating in its varied voices their remarkable collaborations with the works and with each other. Essays by historians, curators and conservators consider such topics as the political and cultural pressures shaping the formation of the photographic avant-garde in Europe, the reception of modernist photography at the time and in subsequent revivals of interest in it, the intellectual backgrounds that were then generating new histories of photography, the standards and rationale for material analysis of photographs and the physical qualities of the photographs in the Walther collection as evidence of the development of photographic materials during the period. Thematic object-based case studies demonstrate new multidimensional approaches to the photograph as a cultural and artistic object in its own right.