1. The Early Years

Bill Brandt was born in 1904 in Hamburg, the second of four brothers in an upper middle class family. In his teens he suffered from TB and entered a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland but moved to Vienna in 1927 for specialist treatment, including psychoanalysis. It was here that he entered a photographic studio, met Eva Boros, who was to become his first wife and took this celebrity photograph of Ezra Pound.

This in turn led to a move to Man Ray’s studio in Paris where he spent three months in 1929 and it was here that Brandt was exposed to the surrealism that was to remain a dominant aspect of much of his work.

Brandt never had a problem with staging situations to give the effect he wanted – the woman in the mask is actually the wife of his brother Rolf.