Word: brassai
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...same way that violinists can be counted on to have remarkable hands, a lot of photographers have great eyes. Brassai's were bouncing balls under aerodynamic eyebrows. You can pretty much imagine them in action when he told people how he got seriously involved with the camera, a development he liked to explain by way of a story he heard from Isadora Duncan, the famous dancer. For a long time she couldn't bear the sight of the pianist whom her rich lover had hired as her accompanist. One day she and the luckless musician were riding face-to-face...
...engaging it. He had a geometer's orientation: in many of his best shots, people are distant figures, elegantly distributed among the grids and arcs of the city. The Paris that issued from his camera was not the serene city of Atget, immemorial and mostly unpeopled. Neither was it Brassai's close-in platform for the dramas of the demimonde. Kertesz's Paris was like the woman in his picture Satiric Dancer: pert, ironic and caught at a fresh tilt...
...Brassai's "Eye of Paris" and recent drawings and photographs by Natalie Alper continue at MIT's Hayden Gallery through...
...Brassai's sensitivity to the character of a subject or situation is matched by an acute eye for form, for the subtle variations of light and dark and shape against background that make his pictures such beautiful formal structures, as well as compelling documents...
...Brassai brings to all his work a rare combination of intelligence and intuition. He is a deliberate creator, patient and painstaking, with a deep committment to the demands of both art and humanity. If he had never chanced to discover his aptitude for taking pictures Paris would have had another biographer but the art of photography would have been immeasurably poorer...