Word: brassai
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...wasn't. (That was Isadora Duncan for you.) But in 1929, when Brassai was finally launched into the embrace of photography, after years of resisting its charms, it really was for keeps. Though the young Hungarian arrived in Paris in 1924 ambitious to be a painter, he spent his first years working as a journalist. Eventually he started taking pictures to accompany his articles. It was his initial embarrassment at mere picture taking that led him to publish his photos under a pseudonym, Brassai, a Hungarian word meaning "from Brasso," his childhood village. He wanted to save his birth name...
...Brassai: The Eye of Paris," the thorough and splendid exhibition that runs through Feb. 28 at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, is the first major retrospective devoted to his work to appear in the U.S. in 30 years. From Houston it moves to Los Angeles and Washington. Next year an even larger show opens in Paris. Brassai is back now in a big way largely because of his fascination with the world after dark in Paris between the wars. Though he stopped taking pictures in the early 1960s, until his death in 1984 he produced a steady output...
...streetlights. That meant a new kind of nighttime, full of sexy pinpoints in the fog, 20th century floodlights over 19th century cobblestones, popguns of brightness in dark places that told dirty jokes about the naked city. As photographers elsewhere were doing--Josef Sudek in Prague, Bill Brandt in London--Brassai claimed as his territory the nocturnal city that camera and film technology was just then arriving at the means to capture...
...remains one of the milestone volumes of 20th century photography. A picture like L'Avenue de l'observatoire in Autumn is about nothing so much as just dark and light. Its unsentimental main "subject" is a car-headlight beam. A bit as Weegee did in New York City, Brassai hit below the beltways of Paris. What he liked best was what he found in the black sockets of the city, under the bridges and in the streets where hookers dangled their stuff and planted themselves with monumental assurance...
Like so many photographers of his day, and not just of his day, Brassai occasionally posed some of the people in pictures that look at first glance like candids. By the 1930s, photographers like Andre Kertesz and Henri Cartier-Bresson had begun to use the new 35-mm handheld Leicas, equipment that could capture fast movement. Brassai persisted in working with a Voigtlander Bergheil. A camera that used small glass plates instead of film--Brassai would eventually adapt it for conventional film--it required a tripod and long exposures. That in turn meant that his subjects usually knew they were...