Beginning in the mid-1940s, Bill Brandt made an extensive series of nudes set in eerily dark, nearly empty interiors in London's Belgravia, St. John's Wood, and Campden Hill neighborhoods. His work as an assistant to Man Ray during the 1930s, and his exposure to French Surrealism had given him a taste for exploiting the camera's "vision." Shot in raking light from exaggerated perspectives with a Kodak wide-angle camera like those police use to document crime scenes, Brandt's images alter his sitters into strange, undulating shapes, converting the female nude into molded topographic forms not unlike the sculptures of his contemporaries Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth.

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