In 1924 a young man named Gyula Halász left Brasov, Transylvania—his Hungarian hometown, annexed by Romania in the aftermath of World War I—and moved to Paris. There he began to call himself Brassaï and discovered his vocation as a photographer working in black and white and almost entirely at night.
In an overcoat specially designed with pockets large enough to hold twenty-four glass negatives, and with cigarettes that he used to time the long exposures—“a Gauloise for a certain light, a Boyard if it was darker”—he walked the streets of Paris, its neighborhoods and suburbs, sometimes with his friend Henry Miller but mostly by himself. He knocked on strangers’ doors and asked to take pictures from their windows; he was arrested three times. He returned to his apartment only once the sun rose or when his supply of glass plates ran out.
If, as Diane Arbus said, “a photograph is a secret about a secret,” Brassaï soon discovered which secrets he wanted to tell—confidences revealed (and withheld) about the after-hours lives of raffish Parisians who frequented the low-life cafés, the high-end brothels and cross-dressers’ clubs; about the workers who repaired and maintained the systems that enabled the city to function; about the way that the light from a street lamp illuminated a long deserted staircase descending a hill in Montmartre.
In his introduction to his photography collection The Secret Paris of the ’30s, Brassaï wrote,
In the hours between midnight and dawn, Paris seemed to Brassaï not only another city but a different world—a “fringe world” with its own climate, its own natural laws, its own geography, denizens, and species.
In an overcoat specially designed with pockets large enough to hold twenty-four glass negatives, and with cigarettes that he used to time the long exposures—“a Gauloise for a certain light, a Boyard if it was darker”—he walked the streets of Paris, its neighborhoods and suburbs, sometimes with his friend Henry Miller but mostly by himself. He knocked on strangers’ doors and asked to take pictures from their windows; he was arrested three times. He returned to his apartment only once the sun rose or when his supply of glass plates ran out.If, as Diane Arbus said, “a photograph is a secret about a secret,” Brassaï soon discovered which secrets he wanted to tell—confidences revealed (and withheld) about the after-hours lives of raffish Parisians who frequented the low-life cafés, the high-end brothels and cross-dressers’ clubs; about the workers who repaired and maintained the systems that enabled the city to function; about the way that the light from a street lamp illuminated a long deserted staircase descending a hill in Montmartre.
In his introduction to his photography collection The Secret Paris of the ’30s, Brassaï wrote,
Just as night birds and nocturnal animals bring a forest to life when its daytime fauna fall silent and go to ground, so night in a large city brings out of its den an entire population that lives its life completely under cover of darkness…I wanted to know what went on inside, behind the walls, behind the facades, in the wings: bars, dives, nightclubs, one-night hotels, bordellos, opium dens. I was eager to penetrate this other world, this fringe world, the secret, sinister world of mobsters, outcasts, toughs, pimps, whores, addicts, inverts. Rightly or wrongly, I felt at the time that this underground world represented Paris at its least cosmopolitan, at its most alive, its most authentic, that in these colorful faces of its underworld there had been preserved from age to age, almost without alteration, the folklore of its most remote past.Perhaps this is why so many of my favorite paintings and photographs are night scenes. Brassaï’s photographs. The nocturnes of James McNeill Whistler and Albert Pinkham Ryder. The dark, dramatically lit landscapes of Jean-François Millet and Albert Bierstadt, especially Millet’s painting of men hunting birds by the light of torches throwing off volleys of sparks. The dreamscapes of Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, populated as they are by the nightmarish phantasms that live only in darkness. The greatest Caravaggios reimagine Christianity’s most theatrical moments as night scenes—the flagellation of Christ, the conversion of Saint Paul, the martyrdom of Saint Peter, the burial of Saint Lucy—perhaps because the painter was himself nocturnal. His circle included criminals and the neighborhood prostitutes he employed as his models; he belonged to a street gang whose nighttime misadventures culminated in the murder that would compel Caravaggio to spend the last years of his brief life on the run. “I often think that the night is more alive and more richly colored than the day,” Vincent van Gogh once wrote to his sister Willemien. “I definitely want to paint a starry sky now.” (...)
In the hours between midnight and dawn, Paris seemed to Brassaï not only another city but a different world—a “fringe world” with its own climate, its own natural laws, its own geography, denizens, and species.
by Francine Prose, Lapham's Quarterly | Read more:
Image: Giovanni di Paolo, 1457. Wikimedia Commons
Image: Giovanni di Paolo, 1457. Wikimedia Commons
