Bottoms up

When Bill Brandt first began to photograph nudes in the late forties, he was vilified by newspaper editors for his soft prints of unattractive women.

These days, critics of his work are rare - the early pictures of acquiescent women in regency settings, distorted and heavily accented by shadows, are viewed as the work of an innovator.

Photographing the female form became Brandt's private passion that took him to the beaches of East Sussex, Normandy and the Cote d'Azure, where his camera abstracted body parts to landscape sculptures. Suntanned knees appear as two perfectly round stacked pebbles in Baie des Anges, 1958. In East Sussex, 1977, a naked curved back looks as worn and enduring as the rock upon which it sits.

There is an intense beauty about these 25 limited edition prints - reproduced in platinum to mark 100 years since Brandt's birth.

The extended grey tones and refined white of platinum are ethereal. The bleached skin tones of a woman and her swathe of dark hair in East Sussex, 1953, gives her a 3-D appearance - her skin appears as smooth as sea-worn glass.

Brandt's surrealist streak (he was an apprentice of Man Ray) seeps out of these photographs. His angles, distortions and warping of the body show it in a perfect form while simultaneously revealing it as strange and wondrous. Indeed, these anatomical tributes unclothe Brandt's philosophy - to expose the familiar as extraordinary and hint at secrets yet to be unearthed.