Brassai: Paris by Night

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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.

One should think of it as amongst the best produced and influential photobooks ever” ( The Photobook, Vol. After the success of his book, 'Paris De Nuit' (1933) he produces a more sanitised vision of nocturnal Paris. By the end of his life, he’d published 17 books and even produced one film, Tant qu’il y aura des bêtes ( As long as there are beasts), which was released in 1955 and won a major prize at the Cannes Film Festival. I have included shortened (ellipsis) versions of the comments to them, which exists in the comments section of the book. Forms dance in silent, slow movements beckoning you forward, hinting of a meaning slightly underwater, gently out of grasp.After fighting in the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I and studying art at Berlin-Charlottenburg’s Academy of Fine Arts, the artist moved to Paris in 1924. The back alleys, metro stations, and bistros he photographed are at turns hauntingly empty or peopled by prostitutes, laborers, thugs, and lovers.

He was roaming a lot of the streets in the evenings, trying to really understand the communities, the activities that were taking place at night,” says Linde B. There is plenty of atmosphere in the pictures and I particularly like the one of two policemen having a quiet cigarette out side their station. Their nocturnal surroundings fascinated the artist, whose photographs are as much an exploration of the technical challenge of portraying darkness as portraits of a hauntingly dramatic night world. First American edition: the original edition of Paris by Night, published as Paris de Nuit in 1933, contained 64 reproductions of photographs by Brassai, printed in heliogravure. Mirrors on either side of the couple’s well-coiffed heads reflect their loving looks and blur the surrounding restaurant.

I no longer have the book as, during a house move many years ago, about half of my book collection and several items of photo equipment were lost. Despite his social clout and early professional successes, Brassaï still viewed himself as an outlander of sorts. The introduction, by Paul Morand, is elegant and does a good job of describing what Paris was like at that time. As the Paris of these images is that preceding 1933 when the book was first self-published in its original form, they are almost impossible to re-take now; the city has seen too many changes.