Untitled (Nude) c. 1955

This is a photograph by Bill Brandt. There are these intense areas of high contrast, this push-pull between the nude in the light and all that surrounding darkness. I imagine Brandt in the darkroom, manipulating these contrasts, burning and dodging to get the tones just right. It's like he's sculpting with light, really physically present with the materials, coaxing the image into being through trial and error. I’m thinking about how he might have been thinking about the relationship between photography and painting, the flat surface and the illusion of depth, this conversation with the nudes of the past. There's something really intimate, personal, and even kind of vulnerable about the way he handles the figure, a feeling of the body and the world pressing in on each other. Like we're all just a bunch of bodies floating around in this sea of light and shadow, trying to make sense of it all.