Bill Brandt leaves picture-perfect legacy - and it's on show Art Basel Hong Kong

Bill Brandt is regarded as one of the masters of 20th-century photography. The German-born, London-based photographer was known for his portraits - which included Francis Bacon, poet Ezra Pound and novelist Graham Greene - and his landscapes, his reportage of London during the blitz and his nudes.

Brandt was, according to London gallerist Michael Hoppen, "part of that young group of artists [in the 1920s and 30s] who saw photography as the great new development of science, art and technology. He created beauty out of science".

A major exhibition of Brandt's work was staged at MOMA in New York last year, which has excited the market and prompted the Michael Hoppen Gallery, which represents the Bill Brandt estate, to bring a collection of his photographs to show at Art Basel Hong Kong.

After the war, Brandt's interests turned to landscapes and then to the human form, photographed within the landscape - mostly on the Sussex coastline - but in a very abstract way. Out of this emerged a series of female nudes, some of which play with shape and perspective in the landscape and, at times, are redolent of Henry Moore's abstract female sculptures.

MOMA considers Brandt's nudes, photographed between 1945 and 1961, as his crowning achievement. Michael Hoppen selected 22 works from this period to exhibit in Hong Kong. They are not sensationalist, as the subject matter is not always obvious.

"I like Chinese and Japanese ink paintings with their tremendous dexterity," Hoppen says. "And there is symmetry with Brandt's nudes, which similarly demonstrate an economy of line, but instead of painting with a brush he plays with light and dark in the darkroom. It is all about blending."