Summary

Brassaï, pseudonym of Gyula Halász (Brașov, September 9, 1899 - Èze, July 8, 1984), was a naturalized French Hungarian photographer. Famous for his nocturnal views of the city and the surrealist vein of his photography. He was also interested in high society, intellectuals, theater and opera. He immortalized Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Alberto Giacometti, among others. He also tried his hand at writing, sculpture and film, all his great passions.

Braşov is today a city in Romania, but in 1899, when Brassaï was born, the southeastern region of Transylvania belonged to Hungarian territory. He later adopted the pseudonym Brassaï, early in his career, in memory of his homeland (it means "of Braşov" - Brasso, in Hungarian). When he was only three years old, Brassaï moved with his family to Paris; his father was a professor of literature at the Sorbonne. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest before enlisting in the cavalry of the Austro-Hungarian Army for the duration of World War I. In 1920 he went to live in Berlin, working as a journalist and resuming his studies at the Academy. His work as a journalist allowed him to travel throughout Europe, but it was in Paris that Brassaï developed his artistic talent, and he began his profession as a photographer. The most significant period of his career was the period between the two world wars.

The 1930s and Montparnasse

In 1924 Brassaï decided to move back to Paris on a permanent basis. He began to frequent Montparnasse, the beating heart of artistic life at the time, getting closer to the Futurism movement and its best-known exponents. He met and befriended writers, poets, men of letters, and artists, many of whom would be very important building blocks in his artistic and life vision. Prominent friendships include Jacques Prévert, whose work he particularly appreciated, and Henry Miller. The latter appreciated him in turn, to the point of calling him "capable of bringing order to chaos." From Paris he would work as a foreign correspondent for some of the most important Hungarian and Romanian newspapers, and it was during this period of intense story research that he realized that the only medium by which reality became representable was photography. A key personality in this epiphany is Andre Kertesz, a Hungarian photographer naturalized American. At the same time Brassaï began working as a photographer and journalist for Minotaure magazine, the main publication of Surrealism; during this period he experimented with portraiture and became the magazine's official portraitist. Among the artists he portrays are Dali, Breton, Giacometti, and Picasso. It will be during this period that Brassaï will develop the Surrealist imprint that characterizes his photographic style; later the artist will be invited several times by Breton to join the official group of Surrealists, but he will always refuse, not recognizing his work as part of the current. Once entrenched in the bowels of Parisian territory, his photographic attention to the city became absolute. In 1932 Picasso commissioned him to document his work as a sculptor. In 1933 he published his first book of photographs, "Paris de nuit," which was a great success, especially in art circles. Henry Miller dubbed it "the eye of Paris." The publication received much praise in the artistic and intellectual world of the time, although it was looked upon with suspicion by the photography world, which recognized Brassaï's merits some time later, after World War II. Two years later he published a second collection, Voluptés de Paris (Pleasures of Paris), which was also a great success especially in artistic and intellectual circles. In the 1940s Brassaï also collaborated with the famous Harper's Bazaar magazine.

From the 1940s onward

During the years of Nazi occupation in Paris, photography was not allowed on the streets, so the photographer left the city and headed south to the French Riviera and resumed sculpture and drawing, arts in which he had specialized at university. At the end of the war the photographer returned to Paris and his business, publishing in 1946 a collection of drawings, Trente Dessins, which also features a poem by Jaques Prévert . In 1948 he married Gilberte Boyer, and finally took French citizenship, with which he had not hitherto been endowed. In 1956 his film Tant qu'il y aura des bêtes won the Special Jury Grand Prix as the most original film at the Cannes Film Festival. In 1968 the Museum of Modern Art in New York dedicated a retrospective exhibition to the photographer, a seminal recognition of his career. He was awarded the title of Knight of Arts and Letters in 1974 and Knight of the Legion of Honor in 1976. In 1978, he won the International Photography Prize in Paris.

He wrote 17 books and numerous articles, including, in 1948, the novel Histoire de Marie, published with an introduction by Henry Miller. In addition, the University of Chicago edited and translated Letter to My Parents and Conversations with Picasso (1964).

He died on July 8, 1984 in Èze, in the Maritime Alps, and was buried at Montparnasse Cemetery in Paris.

In 2000, Gilberte, Brassaï's widow, organized a large commemorative exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Brassaï's photographic style is very close to surrealism, both in terms of themes and light choices. Nevertheless, the photographer never considered himself a surrealist, having as his main goal to objectify reality, and not to evade the representation of it:

His photography is strictly black and white, the subjects often have soft outlines, and the light is often drawn only from that of street lamps, resulting in dark images with dreamlike atmospheres. The favorite subject is the night, and in particular the Parisian night in the Montparnasse district, which he helped make legend. Even when the images are sharp, shadows are always at the center of Brassaï's photography, which is characterized by a bohemian imagery with dark, almost ghostly accents that always leaves a sense of unease in those who admire the shot. He loved Paris at night or in the rain, the villas, the gardens, the waterfront and the timeless streets of the old quarters. Places, even the best-known ones in the French capital, always have an aura of mystery and the unresolved, giving the feeling of being out of time, it is as if at night the places take on a new identity, they could be anywhere at any time. In more than half of Brassaï's shots there are no human figures, instead there are often large patches of light that seem to have no contours and that transfigure deserted urban environments, suggesting endless imaginary scenarios, as if there were always a missing element in the picture that lies in the eyes of the beholder. Very often the photographer uses mirrors to enlarge the scene captured and give the viewer a new perspective with which to look at the image. Often the photographer focuses on details, which decontextualized and taken out of their context take on new meaning. He was called a "Bizarre Angel" by John Szarkowski because of his gift for recreating order from chaos, and his eye was often referred to with adjectives such as "living" or "insatiable." In addition to portraiture, which he experimented with especially early in his career, Brassaï experimented with a variety of photographic styles, ranging from still life to the artistic nude to documenting graffiti found around the city and his famous night views. Several shots chronicle the people of the night including prostitutes in closed houses, gangsters and workers. The photographer's portfolio also includes shots taken during the daytime, evoking French humanist photography.

The technique

All of Brassaï's night shots were presumably taken with long exposure times; legend has it that the photographer would shoot and leave the camera motionless long enough to smoke a Gauloises cigarette, after which he would pick up the camera and return to his room at the Hôtel des Terrasses, where, he would develop the shot in a small darkroom set up behind a curtain. The shots were made by having small areas of light, often street lamps or reflections from wet streets, pierce the areas of shadow; the light, though little, was thus able to define the shapes within the darkness and create a contrast that especially in printmaking gives important depth to the subjects. Brassaï was also an innovator: when he tried his hand at moving subjects he had developed his own method of combining the pose and the snapshot. Thanks to the pose he was able to include the stationary element, while the moving element was photographed thanks to the magnesium flash.

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