Beginning with his apprenticeship to
the Surrealist photographer-artist Man Ray in the early 1930s, Brandt's photo
reportage sustained a poetic edge. After the end of World War II, the mystery
that had been only implied in his documentary photographs assumed a dominant role
in his work. Landscapes and the people that inhabited them were transformed through
the action of the camera into imaginary, graphically ambiguous images.

Traditionally an artistic means of
recording one's own image for posterity, the self-portrait can also serve as a
means to confront and search for the inner being. Brandt's self-portrait is one
such expedition into the realm of the unseen. Incorporating both the
documentary and the surreal facets of his previous oeuvre into this single
image, Brandt has fashioned an imaginary landscape where nothing is fully
detailed or explained. The photographer in the mirror seems to belong to a
world apart from the rocks, earth, and sky that occupy the rest of the image.
The high contrast of the print and the intensity of the light, which
illuminates but does not describe, heighten the ambiguity of the portrait.
Reflective of his personal identity and of his earlier work, the self-portrait
was photographed on the same beaches of the east Sussex coast as Brandt's
famous Perspective of Nudes series, published
in 1961.