Brassai: Paris by Night

Product Information

It was almost certainly my first exposure to any of his works although I have bought other books of his photography in the many years since.

He retained a very individual creative vision, however, commenting: “The surreal effect of my pictures was nothing more than reality made fantastic through a particular vision. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Despite his social clout and early professional successes, Brassaï still viewed himself as an outlander of sorts. We’re looking at these views of 1930s Parisian society,” says Lehtinen, “but they’re also these incredible reflections on broader themes of community, labor, sexuality, gender, class, solitude…alienation, strangeness.The layout, with its characteristic full-page bleeds, never more felicitously employed, takes us from image to image, from page to page, and across night-time Paris, with effortless panache. There, in 1932, he changed his given name, Gyula Halász, to a doctored version of his hometown’s name—his roots as a foreigner remained crucial to his vision and identity. When I slowly turn the pages of the 62 duotone photographs this book consists of, based on Brassaï’s original photographic plates, the twilight world slowly draws me into its ‘phantom planes’, and in doing so this world at moments worries me, as If I am with delay soon about to discover something troublesome within its frames. Before World War II struck the city, he captured foggy avenues with bare trees, the gate to the Luxembourg Gardens, bridges, and street façades.

The current edition has been printed in heliogravure using Brassai's original plates, with the exception of photographs for which the plates have disappeared and which have been reproduced from the 1933 edition: numbers 2, 49, 55, 58, 59 60, 61, as well as the paving-stones appearing on the endpapers. He snapped pictures of the meat porters and kissing couples of the streets, and the giddy inhabitants of restaurants and lounges.The current reissue of Paris by Night brings one of the last century’s key photographic works back into print. As a fan of French photography this is a book I just had to have, the pictures are not the highest quality, but considering the type of camera he was using and that they are taken at night the quality is probably what you would expect. They move like fish in the still dark waters of a lake, men flitting through existence, stuck between two states of being. 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. Lights from cars, windows, hotel signs, snowy grounds, and watery reflections enhance the sense of drama in his dreamy nocturnal shots.