August 1951 (84.XM.801.2)

From the Getty Museum record

One day in a second-hand-shop...I found a 70-year old wooden Kodak. I was delighted. Like nineteenth-century cameras it had no shutter, and the wide-angle lens, with an aperture as minute as a pinhole, was focused on infinity....My new camera saw more and it saw it differently....I interfered very little, and the lens produced anatomical images and shapes which my eyes had never observed. Thus Bill Brandt described how he came to experiment with distortions of the female body through the use of a special lens on an old camera. The woman's crossed leg and foot point like an arrow to the chair, window, and cityscape beyond, which grounds the viewer in a recognizable space. Bill Brandt's nude studies were among the few works he did not create for a professional assignment.