Brassaï, Paris by night
« Hungarian-born French photographer (1899-1984), inventor of urban night photography. »
Born Gyula Halász in Brassó (whence his pseudonym), Brassaï arrived in Paris in 1924 and became a journalist there. Henry Miller called him "the eye of Paris." At 30, he bought a 6x9 Voigtländer and began photographing at night. The book Paris de nuit (1933) made his name.
Wet pavements, fog, streetlamps, prostitutes, hoodlums, dance halls, the Quat'z'Arts ball: he fixed a pre-war Parisian mythology, halfway between Atget and Surrealism. His technique — long exposure, magnesium flash, subjects willing to pose — turned each image into a complicit staging.
A friend of Picasso, Henry Miller, Genet, Brassaï also published on wall graffiti (Graffiti, 1960). A photographer by accident, sculptor and writer, he spent a life observing Paris while remaining foreign to it. Naturalised French in 1949, he died in Beaulieu-sur-Mer in 1984.