Word: brassai
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...eludes me how I'm able to make things come alive," Furst says, then launches into an excited tour of the "astonishingly eccentric" range of research, random and planned, that brings such authenticity to his crepuscular world: the vanity bio of a 1920s Lithuanian, the essays of French photographer Brassai, old Paris Baedekers, and so on. He constantly makes notes of telling details: the cabaret performer with a red light bulb at his crotch that Furst once spotted in a book by Cyrus Sulzberger turns up in Kingdom...
...Baskett does not compare himself to Atget or Brassai; their tradition of exploring and exposing the very skin and bones of Paris inside is not his own. Instead, "These photographs concern small moments and transient feelings, ephemera that may never have existed outside [a] single morning's ramble...
...Brassai it wasn't always a matter of posing people so much as positioning his camera before them and waiting for them to assume the configurations he was looking for. What he wanted were archetypal scenes of Paris life in which the people were not caught in motion but in essence. Even in a picture of romantic treachery as subtly animated as Conchita with Sailors--there's a world of sexy waywardness in those spitcurl bangs alone--the people are as weighty and immemorial as Egyptian temple statues. And even when he made a picture in full daylit motion, like...
...especially after World War II, when Europe was in ruins and civilization had been bested for a while by its discontents, that Brassai discovered the weird beauty of graffiti. Just as he had seen what was lovely in the louche spectacle of the Parisian cafes, he recognized what was indelible about graffiti, the bad penmanship of the group unconscious. In his photographs of the stick figures and screaming heads carved and scribbled on Paris walls, you find the most unruly human impulses--sex, anger, even exaltation--brought alive and made legible in odd corners...
...Brassai's graffiti pictures would be immensely influential among postwar artists like Jean Dubuffet and Antoni Tapies, who were sifting the rubble for a new imagery suited to a postapocalyptic world. Brassai would also make a considerable name for himself through his camera portraits of the artists and writers who were his friends, including Picasso, Miller, Matisse and Giacometti. But his greatest work will always be his views of nocturnal Paris. He made the night something...