The present lot features Bill Brandt's then ten-year old niece, Judith.

"Brandt's distinctive vision - his ability to present the mundane world as fresh and strange - emerged in London in the 1930s, and drew from his time in the Paris studio of Man Ray. His visual explorations of the society, landscape, and literature of England are indispensable to any understanding of photographic history and, arguably, to our understanding of life in Britain during the middle of the 20th century."1

Bill Brandt is one of Britain's preeminent photographers, celebrated for his ability to capture the essence of his time with imagination and compassion. His practice traced the stark realities of the 1930s Depression through the intimate forms of documentary photography, including portraits, nudes and landscapes.

In the present lot, Brandt captures, with distinctive sensibility, the face of a young girl against the backdrop of a domestic setting. The girl's face frames the foreground of the image, creating a dreamlike, almost surrealist quality that transforms her ordinary face into something else. Captured in 1955, the image has been featured in multiple significant exhibitions globally, including 'A History of Photography from Chicago Collection' (1982) at the Art Institute of Chicago as well as 'Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light' (2013) at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Brandt was at the forefront of embedding photography as a modernist artistic medium, influencing a pantheon of photographic masters globally.

1. Museum of Modern Art (2013) 'Bill Brandt: Shadow and Light' Exhibition Text, online, https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1318, accessed 20 August 2024.