Brassai

Although Brassai was a leading member of the French "school" of photography, he was born Jules Halasz in Brasov, Hungary. (He takes his pseudonym from his birthplace.) Originally Brassai had an aversion to photography. As a young man, he studied painting and sculpture in the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest. Later he became a journalist, coming to Paris in 1918. There he fell in love with the city and with the camera.Brassai sees Paris as a subject of infinite grandeur, his photographs providing a sensitive and often extremely dramatic exploration of its people, its resplendent avenues, and endlessly intriguing byways. Brassai’s reputation was established with the publication of his first book,Paris at Night, now a modern classic. Some of the pictures in this book are sharply defined, brilliantly lit, while others capture the mistiness of rainy nights. Still others concentrate on the shadowy life of the underworld.

As Brassai created more and more pictures of Parisian life, his fame became international. His pictures of "Graffiti" (writings and drawings scribbled by countless individuals on the crumbling walls of buildings) were the subject of his one - man show at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Brassai has indicated something of his reason for making these pictures in the following statement: "the thing that is magnificent about photography is that it can produce images that incite emotion based on the subject matter alone."