Brassai’s ‘Paris by Night’ was a book I couldn’t put down and it got me regularly out & about with my camera at night for the first time.
Brassaï (the pseudonym of Gyula Halász) (September 9, 1899 – July 8, 1984) was a Hungarian photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker who rose to fame in France. When I first discovered Brassaï’s book ‘Paris by Night’ whilst studying at art college, it was a revelation to me. The atmospheric quality with which he captured Paris after-dark had a significant influence on my own style and continues to influence my thinking and shooting now, some twenty years later. Anyone interested in black and white photography, lighting, street photography and social documentary photography should see this great man’s work.
Photographing Paris was a lifelong pursuit for Brassaï’. His exploration of the city, its streets, and its people remains unparalleled. The way he saw and captured the grandeur in the mundane comes to mind whenever I am walking in a city with my camera; seeing the details, noticing the beauty even in the smallest and – to many – most everyday of things.
Brassaï’ had an eye for the everyday as well as an immense talent for being able to capture the majesty and the grand sweep of one of Europe’s most grandiose of capitals. His work continues to attract a massive following and rightly so.
Gallery of Brassaï Photos [all copyright rests with the Brassaï Estate]
Who was Brassaï’?
Gyula Halász was born in Brassó (Bra?ov), in Romania, to a Hungarian father and an Armenian mother. He is sometimes incorrectly described as Jewish. At age three, his family moved to live in Paris, France for a year, while his father, a Professor of Literature, taught at the Sorbonne. As a young man, Gyula Halász studied painting and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest, before joining a cavalry regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army, where he served until the end of the First World War. In 1920 Halász went to Berlin, where he worked as a journalist and studied at the Berlin-Charlottenburg Academy of Fine Arts.
In 1924 he moved to Paris where he would live the rest of his life. In order to learn the French language, he began teaching himself by reading the works of Marcel Proust. Living amongst the huge gathering of artists in the Montparnasse Quarter, he took a job as a journalist. He soon became friends with Henry Miller, Léon-Paul Fargue, and the poet Jacques Prévert.
Gyula Halász’s job and his love of the city, whose streets he often wandered late at night, led to photography. He later wrote that photography allowed him to seize the Paris night and the beauty of the streets and gardens, in rain and mist. Using the name of his birthplace, Gyula Halász went by the pseudonym “Brassaï,” which means “from Brasso.” As Brassaï, he captured the essence of the city in his photographs, publishing his first book of photographs in 1933 titled “Paris de nuit” (“Paris by Night”). His efforts met with great success, resulting in his being called “the eye of Paris” in an essay by his friend Henry Miller. In addition to photos of the seedier side of Paris, he also provided scenes from the life of the city’s high society, its intellectuals, its ballet, and the grand operas. He photographed many of his great artist friends, including Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso,
Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, plus many of the prominent writers of his time such as Jean Genet, Henri Michaux and others.
Brassaï’s photographs brought him international fame leading to a one-man show in the United States at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, the Art Institute in Chicago, Illinois, and at New York City‘s Museum of Modern Art.
In 1956, his film, Tant qu’il y aura des bêtes, won the “Most Original Film” award at the Cannes Film Festival and in 1974 he was made Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters and given the Legion of Honor in 1976. Two years later, in 1978, he won the first “Grand Prix National de la Photographie” in Paris.
As well as a photographer, Brassaï was the author of seventeen books and numerous articles, including the 1948 novel Histoire de Marie, which was published with an introduction by Henry Miller. His Letters to My Parents and Conversations with Picasso, have been translated into English and published by the University of Chicago Press.
After 1961, when he stopped taking photographs, Brassaï concentrated his considerable energy on sculpting in stone and bronze. Several tapestries were made from his designs based on his photographs of graffiti.
Brassaï died on July 7, 1984 in Beaulieu-sur-Mer, Alpes-Maritimes, in the south of France and was interred in the Cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris. The copyright representative for the Estate of Brassaï is French photography agency Réunion des Musées Nationaux (RMN), which also mangages more than 1,400 high resolution scans of Brassaï’s work.
In 2000, an exhibition of some 450 works by Brassaï was organized with the help of his widow, Gilberte at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
Links to online collections of Brassaï”s work
- Masters of fine art photography – 17 photos
- Masters of photography – large collection, slightly difficult to navigate but bear with it.
- Art Institute of Chicago – extensive
