His photography is held in several public collections, including the Tate, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Portrait Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum. He wasn’t one for mass production. Each print was an original, printed and finished by Brandt with utmost care. Bill Brandt: Photographs. Exhibition catalogue, introduction by Aaron Scharf. London: Arts Council of Great Britain, 1970. By using this antiquated equipment he was able to produce an image where the human form was heavily distorted and viewed in an unrealistically deep perspective.

The extreme social contrast during those years before the war was, visually, very inspiring for me. I started by photographing in London, the West End, the suburbs, the slums. Bill Brandt Bill Brandt | Photographer | Blue Plaques | English Heritage". english-heritage.org.uk . Retrieved 23 July 2022.

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For his photojournalism and portrait work, Brandt used a Rolleiflex. From the 1950s, he used a Hasselblad with a Zeiss Biogon 38mm super wide-angle lens for his landscape and nude photography. After his health stabilized, Brandt needed to decide what to do with his life. A therapist he had seen in Vienna while visiting his brother Rolf suggested he try photography. Brandt apprenticed himself at the Grete Kolliner studio, where he worked for nearly three years perfecting his darkroom techniques. In 1940, Brandt was commissioned by the government’s Ministry of Information to report on Londoners seeking refuge in underground air-raid shelters. Brandt, Bill with an introduction by Raymond Mortimer. The English at Home. London: BT Batsford, Ltd, 1936.

Brandt followed her advice and secured an apprenticeship with the Austrian photographer Grete Kolliner. For the series, Brandt photographed the streets of London after dark, capturing the eerie beauty of the city. Brandt’s work has influenced many photographers including Robert Frank, Sir Don McCullin, David Bailey and Roger Mayne. For] whatever the reason, the poetic trend of photography, which had already excited me in my early Paris days, began to fascinate me again. it seemed to me that there were wide fields still unexplored. I began to photograph nudes, portraits, and landscapes. Bill Brandt Brandt had his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1969. His work has since been the subject of major retrospectives in both the UK and abroad.Brandt spent his remaining years reissuing his work in a series of books and teaching photography at the Royal College of Art. Haworth-Booth, Mark introduction and essay by David Mellor. Bill Brandt: Behind the Camera. Photographs, 1928-1983. Oxford: Phaidon, 1985.

Brandt took his time breaking into the illustrated magazine market. Still, he was conscious of how much competition there was in Paris to get assignments. In London, the photographic scene had not yet taken off. The country was behind the continent in terms of art and photography. Brandt also wanted to find a place where he could turn himself into a new person. His brother Rolf recalled that “Billy” had always wanted to be English and belong to the “fairy-tale island” of his childhood fantasies. In 1934, he settled in London and made the city his permanent home. He selected as his professional name “Bill Brandt” and soon gave every appearance that he was a British-born gentleman. When I have found a landscape which I want to photograph, I wait for the right season, the right weather, and the right time of day or night, to get the picture which I know to be there.'Knoblauch, Loring (6 May 2013). "Bill Brandt, Early Prints from the Collection of the Family @Edwynn Houk". Collector Daily . Retrieved 8 August 2020. His photos were more experimental and characterized by a mysterious and brooding quality that provided a fresh look on some of the most common genres: portraiture, landscape and the nude. Although there was little direct teaching from Man Ray, Brandt was able to absorb the new developments in photography and various art movements in Paris. The Museum of Modern Art has taken on the task of distilling Brandt's lifetime oeuvre into a comprehensive retrospective, which opened Wednesday. The exhibition's catalog describes him as "the artist who defined the potential of photographic modernism in England for much of the twentieth century."

Hermanson Meister, Sarah. Shadow and Light. Exhibition catalogue. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 2013. ISBN 9780870708459.Although they did not meet (and become lifelong friends) until 1942, Brandt and sculptor Henry Moore had both been commissioned by the Ministry to Information to photograph and sketch (respectively) "Shelter Pictures". Curator Martina Droth observed that both had been drawn to the sight of "intermingling of bodies in the Liverpool Street Underground Extension - which Moore later described as 'hundreds of Henry Moore reclining figures' - and both sought out among them individuals caught in moments of solitary isolation". She adds however that "while Brandt photographs were shot in the shelters (as, of course, they had to be), Moore was 'ashamed to intrude on private suffering' and made his sketches from memory". Brandt’s photographs of the nude are a significant part of his output from the 1940s onwards; he combined composition and technique to create psychologically haunting and formally inventive studies. Works such as Nude, Campden Hill, London 1957 (Tate P14999), Nude, Campden Hill, London, c.1956 1956 (Tate P15000), Nude, London, 1958 1958 (Tate P15001), Nude, Belgravia, London, 1953 1953 (Tate P15004), Nude, Campden Hill, London, 1955 1955 (Tate P15007), Nude, St. John’s Wood, London, 1955 1955 (Tate P14997) and Nude, London, 1950, March 1950 (Tate P15008) were shot not in studios but in rooms of Brandt’s choosing, so that he could go beyond the basic elements of form and light. In Bill Brandt: A Life, Paul Delany explained: In 1984, Bill Brandt was posthumously inducted into the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum. [5] Blue plaque, 4 Airlie Gardens Suspended social life, long railway journeys and the need to reaffirm ideas of national identity all encouraged a return to the literary classics. Brandt shared in this. He read and admired the writings of the Brontë sisters, Thomas Hardy, George Crabbe and John Clare, some of whose poems he knew by heart. From 1945 onwards Brandt contributed a series of landscape photographs, accompanied by texts selected from British writers, to Lilliput. Other landscapes appeared in Picture Post and the American magazine Harper's Bazaar. With camera in hand, he took in the city with the sharpness of an outsider, producing two books that were careful studies of English life: The English at Home (1936) and A Night in London (1938). His photographs offered an inventory of British types—bobbies, tailors, homemakers, miners, chambermaids, schoolchildren, shopkeepers—and preserved the world of 1930s England that was disappearing forever.