Brassai took his name from the town of his birth,
Brasso, in
Transylvania, then part of Hungary, later of Roumania, and famous as the home
of Count Dracula. He studied art at the academies of Budapest and Berlin before
coming to Paris in the mid-twenties. He was completely disinterested in photography,
if not scornful of it, until he saw the work being done by his acquaintance André Kertész,
which
inspired him to take up the medium himself. In the early thirties he set about
photographing the night life of Paris, especially at its more colorful and more
disreputable levels. The result of this project - a fascinatingly tawdry collection
of prostitutes, pimps, madams, transvestites, apaches, and assorted cold-eyed
pleasure seekers
- was published in 1933 as Paris de Nuit, one of the most remarkable of all photographic
books.
Making photographs in the dark bistros and darker
streets presented a difficult technical problem. Brassai's solution
was direct, primitive, and perfect. He focused his small plate
camera on a tripod, opened the shutter when ready, and fired a
flashbulb. If the quality of his light did not match that of the
places where he worked, it was, for Brassai, better: straighter,
more merciless, more descriptive of fact, and more in keeping with
Brassai's own vision, which was as straightforward as a hammer.
When Paris de Nuit was published, the great
photographer and theorist Dr. Peter Henry Emerson, then approaching
eighty, wrote Brassai in care of his publisher, asking Brassai
to please send his proper address, so that Emerson could send
him the medal that he had awarded him for his splendid book.
It is an interesting comment on the chaotic incoherence of photographic
history that Brassai had never heard of Emerson.
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