Bill Brandt: a life Paul Delany Jonathan Cape, 335pp, £35 ISBN 0804750033

Bill Brandt would have been 100 this year. Brandt - now recognised as one of the greatest British photographers of the 20th century - was a shy and complex man who constantly reinvented himself through his work.

Despite international acclaim, his private life remained shrouded in mystery. Paul Delany's biography attempts to unravel the truth about Brandt, working from the testimonies of friends and family and, most importantly, his photographs. We learn about Brandt's background, his triangular relationships with women and about his three unconventional marriages, but the inner Brandt can perhaps still best be understood through his work.

Part of the Brandt enigma was that, despite a German accent he never lost, he insisted that he had been born in south London. In fact, Hermann Wilhelm Brandt was born in Hamburg in 1904 to a family of wealthy bankers and merchants. The English connection began with Brandt's grandfather, who had lived and worked in London in the late 19th century. Brandt's father was born in London, and his British citizenship passed to his sons.

Brandt's early life was one of bourgeois privilege, though it was governed by rigid hierarchies and philistinism. He and his younger brother Rolf were the sensitive, creative ones among four sons, but when "Willy" was 15, his father shipped him off to a tough Prussian boarding school. It was an experience which, Delany maintains, scarred Brandt deeply and was at the root of his rejection of all things German. It was only when he fell ill with asthma and TB that he was able to escape for four years to a Swiss sanatorium in Davos.

From 1927 to 1933, Brandt lived first in Vienna, where he was apprenticed to a portrait photographer (and photographed Ezra Pound), and then in Paris as an assistant to Man Ray. The cultural influences of those years are revealed in his work: psychoanalysis and the surrealist dream-world of the unconscious; the films of Bunuel and DalI; German expressionist cinema; and the stark realism of the photography of Atget, Kertesz and BrassaI (who became a close friend).

By the time he settled in London in 1934, he was developing an eclectic style of his own. He loved the social contrasts of English life in the 1930s and 1940s, and was as fascinated by the rituals of upper-class houses as he was by the poverty of East End slums, Welsh mining communities and the grim, industrial north of the Depression. He produced two books of photographs - The English at Home (1936) and A Night in London (1938) which was inspired by the success of BrassaI's Paris by Night. This attracted the editors of new magazines such as Weekly Illustrated, Lilliput and Picture Post. Under the editorship of Tom Hopkinson, Brandt established himself as one of Picture Post's finest photojournalists, producing some of his most haunting images. "He wasn't interested in anything that didn't lend itself to mystery," Hopkinson said. "The mystery was in Bill, and he projected it on to whatever he photographed."

Brandt's pictures from those years are now seen as definitive documents of social history. It seems irrelevant that he faked some of the images by using lovers and family as models. He believed it was the result that counted, "no matter how it was achieved", and most of his results were achieved in the darkroom. His negatives were his canvas - there to be cropped, retouched and experimented upon. In the 1970s, he even changed the tones of his pictures. Earlier soft, grey prints were transformed into startling areas of black and white - which made them immediately distinctive.

Towards the end of the war, he lost his enthusiasm for reportage and concentrated on moody landscapes (particularly those with literary associations), atmospheric portraits of the artistic great and good, and one of his enduring passions - the female nude.

In 1941, he had seen Citizen Kane and had fallen in love with the way it looked. He wanted to replicate the effects of the wide-angle, deep-focus camera-work for his own nude studies, and in 1944, in a second-hand shop near Covent Garden, he found a 70-year-old Kodak police camera. It cost £5 and had no shutter - its fixed wide-angle lens and pinhole aperture focused on infinity. Brandt was drawn to the combination of distortion and clarity that it allowed, and for the next 15 years was preoccupied with photographing nudes in elegant rooms and in sculptural close-up on the beaches of Sussex and Normandy. This revolutionary series was published to great acclaim as Perspective of Nudes in 1961 and with it, Brandt's reputation was secured.

Brandt continued to work right up until his death in 1983. The late photographs include a series of controversial nudes that are more about fantasy and fetishism than the female form. His last years were dogged by ill-health, depression and paranoia. Delany hints at all kinds of external conflicts, but fails to go into detail. Brandt's photographic legacy is indisputable, but the contradictions and riddles of his life are likely to persist.

"Bill Brandt: a centenary retrospective" is at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London SW7 (020 7942 2000) from 24 March to 25 July. "Bill Brandt: portraits" is at the National Portrait Gallery, London WC2 (020 7306 0055) from 20 March to 30 August

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