Bill Brandt

The German-born photographer Bill Brandt created a series of photographic studies of nude women in the 1940s and ’50s, some on beaches and others, such as this, in large, relatively empty London apartment rooms. These images often have unusual cropping and disturbing bodily distortions, a result of Brandt’s experiments with a turn-of-the-century wooden Kodak camera that had a wide-angle lens and no viewfinder. In this picture, the viewer’s position is like that of a child, confronted by the exaggerated physical presence of the nude female body. Brandt photographed a variety of women, including professional models, friends, and relatives, though the images rarely offer clues to their identities.