BRASSAI
IN PARIS,
Hayward Gallery London SE1 through May 13
Gyula Halasz was his real name.
The Transylvanian was a photographer par excellence, yet
curiously secretive. He was also , like other Transylvanians, something
of a night bird, stalking the banks of the Seine, to catch couples,
or individual nudes, or nodding vagrants more or less intact with
his bulky Voigtlander. Paris, secretively by night in the l930s,
so turned out to be a superbly historical documentation, without
celebrities to spoil its magnetic manipulation of glass negative
and aperture. It is useful to compare Brassai’s Paris of the
people, pimps and whores, petty criminals pre-Belmondo, with Caravaggio’s
Rome- so fortuitously accessible together in London this spring.
Caravaggio had to stage his set-pieces, and it is no surprise to
see Brassai did the same, street lamps, railings, statuesque monuments,
and citizenry realer than real, and with a bonus inconceivable in
Caravaggio’s time, graffiti galore. Brassai’s book The
Secret Paris of the 30’s is being reissued appropriately
by Thames and Hudson,the publishers.
