Brassai: Paris by Night

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The more I reflect upon the workload itself, I wonder about his habits as he went out each night to photograph. Despite his social clout and early professional successes, Brassaï still viewed himself as an outlander of sorts.

They move like fish in the still dark waters of a lake, men flitting through existence, stuck between two states of being. If I have any criticism, it is that there are too few pages and images in the book but that was Brassai's personal choice. In 1933 Brassaï published 64 of these scenes in his first book of photographs, Paris de Nuit, which became an immediate hit.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Altogether, they contributed to the art magazine Minotaure, edited by Surrealist forerunner André Breton.

The survey includes Brassaï’s pictures of street graffiti, female nudes, and his famous friends such as Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí. One of the most important and influential photographers of the twentieth century, Brassai (1899-1984) moved to Paris from Hungary in 1924.In the early thirties [Brassaï] set about photographing the night of Paris, especially at its more colorful and more disreputable levels. First published in French in 1932, this new edition brings one of Brassa's finest works back into print. Titled Couple d’amoureux dans un petit café, quartier Italie ( Loving couple in a small cafe, Italy district), the photograph exudes lust and old-world glamour, exemplifying just what made the photographer’s vision so enduring; more than eight decades after its creation, the image remains as evocative and seductive as ever. After the success of his book, 'Paris De Nuit' (1933) he produces a more sanitised vision of nocturnal Paris. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products.

This book totally took my mind off my surroundings though and I was stuck in a reverie about summer and travel plans. Ein wunderbarer Bildband, aus einer Zeit, als Fotografieren noch eine hochkomplizierte Kunst war und Bilder entweder gleich, oder niemals etwas geworden sind. The back alleys, metro stations, and bistros he photographed are at turns hauntingly empty or peopled by prostitutes, laborers, thugs, and lovers. In one of Brassaï’s most famous photographs, a man and a woman canoodle in the corner of a Parisian coffee house in the early 1930s, smoke curling from a lit cigarette between the woman’s fingers.The roads ebb by like frozen boiling rivers, through the blinding lights all effervescent yellow forever dimming upwards, hawking wares like glittering salvations from the heart of the night's pure diversion from diurnal life. Fortunately, I have many more examples of his work in other books in my collection and I still find surprises in some images even after looking at them for a third or fourth or whichever multiple of times I have removed a book from the shelf. One, On the boulevard Saint-Jacques (1930–32), even captures Brassaï in his element: He stands on a snowy Parisian street in a heavy coat and a brimmed hat, cigarette propped between his lips, peering into a tripod-mounted camera.