Brassai Magazine Spread

Vintage Issue Also URBAN SHOOTS CREATIVE LOW LIGHT PHOTOGRAPHY Summer 2013 $5 US/$6 Canadian



Paris streets sculptor, and filmmaker, George Brassaï was born Gyula Halász in Brassó (Braṣov), in south-east Transylvania, Austria-Hungary (today in Romania), to a Hungarian father and an Armenian mother. Brassaï took his assumed name from the town of his birth which was famous as the home of Count Dracula. He was one of the numerous Hungarian artists who flourished in Paris beginning between the World Wars. In the early 21st century, the discovery of more than 200 letters and hundreds of drawings and other items from the period 1940–1984 has provided scholars with material for understanding his later life and career. As a young man, Brassaï studied studied painting and sculpture at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts (Magyar Képzomuvészeti Egyetem) in Budapest. He joined a cavalry regiment of the Austro-Hungarian army, where he served until the end of the First World War. He started studies at the Berlin- Charlottenburg Academy of Fine Arts (Hochschule für Bildende Künste), now Universität der Künste Berlin. There he became friends with several older Hungarian artists and writers, including the painters Lajos Tihanyi and Bertalan Pór, and the writer György Bölöni, each of whom later moved to Paris and became part of the Hungarian circle. (Continued on page 23) Mirage  page 21



Do you know what Picasso saidwhen he looked at my drawingsin 1939? ‘You're crazy, Brassaï.You have a gold mine and youspend your time exploiting asalt mine!’ The salt mine was?Naturally — photography!Before coming to Paris in the mid-twenties, he was completely disinterestedin photography, if not scornful of it,until he saw the work being done by hisacquaintance Andre Kertesz, which inspiredhim to take up the medium himself.In the early thirties, he set aboutphotographing the night of Paris,especially at its more colorful andmore disreputable levels. The resultsthis project — a fascinatingly tawdrycollection of prostitutes, pimps, madams,transvestites, apaches, and assorted cold-eyed pleasure-seekers — was publishedin 1933 as Paris de Nuit, one of the mostremarkable of all photographic books.Making photographs in the dark bistrosand darker streets presented a difficulttechnical problem. Brassaï’s solution wasdirect, primitive and perfect. He focused hissmall plate camera on a tripod, opened theshutter when ready and fired a flashbulb.If the quality of his light did not matchthat of the places where he worked, it was,for Brassaï, better — straighter, moremerciless, more descriptive of fact, andmore in keeping with Brassaï’s own vision,which was as straightforward as a hammer.His efforts met with great success, resultingin his being called “the eye of Paris” inan essay by his friend Henry Miller. Inaddition to photos of the seedier side ofParis, he also provided scenes from the lifeof the city’s high society, its intellectuals,its ballet, and the grand operas. Hephotographed many of his great artistfriends, including Salvador Dalí, PabloPicasso, Henri Matisse, Alberto Giacometti, Mirage  page 23

Portrait of Brassai by John Loengard — photographer, author and plus many of the prominent writers of his time such as Jeanformer director of photography for Life magazine — from his book, Genet, Henri Michaux and others. He later wrote that he usedAge of Silver: Encounters with Great Photographers. photography “in order to capture the beauty of streets and gardens in the rain and fog, and to capture Paris by night.” There are many photographs which are full of life but which are confusing and difficult to remember. It is the force of an image which matters. When Paris de Nuit was published, the great photographer and theorist, Dr. Peter Henry Emerson, then approaching eighty, wrote Brassaï in care of his publisher, asking Brassaï 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 Brassaï had never heard of Emerson. Brassaï’s photographs brought him international fame leading to a one-man show in1948 in the United States at the George Eastman House in Rochester, New York, the Art Institute in Chicago, Illinois and at New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. MOMA exhibited more of Brassai’s works in 1953, 1956 and 1968.No light? No problem. Now you can get great photos in low light with the new Olympus Ep-1 www.olympus.com Mirage  23