This is book shows several of his masterpieces and is definitivelly worth of buying. A sense of humour is hidden in his photographs...

I recieved this book last christmas as a gift after been totally inspired by his work in various galleries and musems for some years. This book is beautifully presented covering the different subject matters including london, north england, nudes. Looking at these pictures gives one an overall idea what a great talent he was and is one of the gretest photographers of all time. If you are a lover of fine art photography or just enjoy great photography this book is most defently worth buying. A brilliant book.

This book really shows how amazing Bill Brandt was as both a photographer and an artist. His work dives into so many areas from landscapes, to documentry work, to stunning figure studies. His use of high contrast is haunting in the best possible way. I was particularly pleased with the way the book covers his entire body of work.

"Big and Noisy" is my two-and-a-half year-old son's version of a security blanket right now. He loves the book, loves making the sounds of the machinery, and takes the book everywhere he goes. I didn't realize how much he'd absorbed until a couple of weeks ago, when we took a trip through a section of interstate that was under construction. He could name EVERY piece of heavy machinery that we passed! A very fun book for this toddler age!

Bill Brandt's work has a striking poetic immediacy and a potent suggestiveness of mood rarely seen in still photography. Sombre landscapes, brooding portraits of prominent literary figures, and surreal, distorted, abstract nudes are featured in this superb, nearly comprehensive volume of the great man's oeuvre.

Just a slight glance at some of these unforgettable pictures and the viewer is hypnotized--eyes rapt to the page--drawn into a strange, mysterious world of the past and overwhelmed by its melancholy lyricism. One senses a profound humanity in Brandt's treatment of desolation and poverty: a quality comparable to the best work of Expressionist painters like Munch or Schiele.

It is interesting to note that the visual sensibility found in Brandt's high contrast, black-and-white compositions and sometimes startling, baroque perspectives also bears comparison to the cascading, labyrinthine imagery of Orson Welles's films. And the influence of Brandt's work appears evident in a number of other dreamy/nightmarish films: e.g., Ingmar Bergman's "The Silence," Roman Polanski's "Repulsion," David Lynch's "Eraserhead" and "The Elephant Man," and Michael Radford's "Nineteen Eighty-Four," to name but a few.

To put it simply: Bill Brandt is a genius of the lens--a supreme master of light and shadow--and, without a doubt, one of the most vital and innovative artists of the twentieth century.

We borrowed this book from the library for our 15 month old son, Ryan, and he absolutley loves it so much, I had to buy it! This is the first book that he has actually started pointing to pictures when we ask him things like, "Where is the computer? or Where are the shoes?" This book has great big photos (not drawn pictures) and I think toddlers can definately relate. We spend a lot of time with this book, looking at it over and over and he gets such a kick out of learning and talking about what's in the book. I highly recommend it!

The Pushcart Prize is the most wonderful and rewarding annual anthology out there because, for one thing, it's the most fair--as Bill Henderson says in his introduction, there's no money here. You don't have to have written a bestseller or be in with the "New Yorker" crowd in order to be published here. All you have to do is be a good writer. Here is fiction and poetry at its rawest and purest form, from writers who write for the sake of writing, for the sheer love of it. This is a noble thing.