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My images were surreal simply in the sense that my vision brought out the fantastic dimension of reality. My only aim was to express reality, for there is nothing more surreal than reality itself. If reality fails to fill us with wonder, it is because we have fallen into the habit of seeing it as ordinary.
Brassaï, Brassai, Paris
Born Gyula Halász in Transylvania, 1899. Came to Paris in the 1920s and fell in love with the city at night.
Not the Paris of postcards and tourists. The real Paris. After dark. The streets, the alleys, the brothels, the opium dens, the artists’ studios, the lovers in doorways, the prostitutes waiting under street lamps. The stuff respectable people pretended didn’t exist.
He taught himself photography to capture it. Borrowed a camera, hit the streets after midnight. Paris de Nuit, Paris by Night, published in 1933. Changed everything. Nobody was photographing like this. The graffiti, the working girls, the lovers, the late-night cafés. Foggy streets. Gas lamps. The city breathing.
Friends with Picasso. Henry Miller wrote about him, called him “the eye of Paris.” That’s what he was. He saw what everyone else walked past.
Didn’t just shoot the gutter. Photographed high society too, artists, writers, the ballet. But it’s the night work that matters. The photographs that showed Paris wasn’t just the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. It was flesh and loneliness and desire and survival.
The guy who made art out of darkness, who loved the city most people only saw in daylight. Gone in 1984.
He saw Paris the way it actually was. Dirty, beautiful, alive.
Shot on infrared film in Cimetière du Montparnasse. Signed Limited Edition 11” x17” print of 10; stamped on verso. Professional black & white printing on Hahnemühle fibre-based Matt paper.