Born Gyula Hal\u00e1sz in Brass\u00f3, Hungary (today Bra\u0219ov, Romania), in 1899, Brassa\u00ef \u2013 meaning \u201cfrom Brass\u00f3\u201d \u2013 studied fine arts in Budapest and Berlin before settling in Paris in 1924. A gifted writer \u2013 he apparently taught himself French by reading Proust \u2013 he initially made a living from journalism while keeping company with Montparnasse\u2019s other bohemian \u00e9migr\u00e9s. He hoped buying photographic equipment would facilitate his entry into photojournalism, then in a state of transformation owing to the advent of the portable 35mm camera and the flashbulb.<\/p>\n
Instead, under the tutelage of fellow Hungarian Andr\u00e9 Kert\u00e9sz, Brassa\u00ef pioneered the art of nocturnal photography, wandering the streets of the metropolis by night with a Voigtl\u00e4nder Bergheil folding plate camera and wooden tripod. Over two years he created the 60 black-and-white, high contrast images of rain-slicked cobblestones, fog-enshrouded architecture and marginalised denizens of the city\u2019s night-time economy that would comprise his first published collection, Paris de nuit (1933). \u201cIt is,\u201d he would later say, \u201cto capture the beauty of the streets and gardens, in the rain and fog, and to capture the Parisian night that I became a photographer.\u201d<\/p>\n
In contrast with the candid, spontaneous ways of working favoured by his contemporary Henri Cartier-Bresson, Brassa\u00ef strove to establish relationships with his subjects. The result is a fascinating tension. While sometimes deeply, even shockingly intimate, Brassa\u00ef\u2019s photographs do not reveal the artist as a voyeur so much as a kind of co-participant, his subjects knowing signatories to what feels like a mutually empathetic contract with their chronicler.<\/p>\n
He meticulously composed his images and was careful not to waste any of the 24\u00a0glass plates that were all he could carry on his walks. He measured distances by knotting a piece of string and timed exposures by how long it took to smoke one or more cigarettes. Unlike Cartier-Bresson, he approached photography as a hands-on, end-to-end process, remaining committed throughout his career to developing his photographs himself in his own darkroom.<\/p>\n
Perhaps no modern city has been as reproduced or mediated as much as Paris, yet Brassa\u00ef\u2019s photographs … resist the kind of kitschification that has befallen the works of many of his contemporaries.<\/p>\n
Curated by Lesley Harding, Emmanuelle de l\u2019Ecotais and Philippe Ribeyrolles \u2013 the artist\u2019s nephew and executor \u2013 and showing at the Heide Museum of Modern Art, Brassa\u00ef: Secret Paris assembles about 150 of the artist\u2019s gelatin silver photographs, all of them prints developed by Brassa\u00ef himself between the 1930s and 1970s. Collectively, they both record and aestheticise the vanished world of 1930s Paris \u2013 gas lamps and traffic signals, brothels and restaurants, slums and avenues \u2013 its deep, almost agential shadows permeated with moonlight and neon, and all of it inflected with melancholy and decadence. It is, apparently, the first retrospective of Brassa\u00ef\u2019s work in Australia since the 1970s, as well as the most expansive survey undertaken in this country.<\/p>\n
Individual rooms are themed around day- and night-time photography, Brassa\u00ef\u2019s intersections with Picasso and the Parisian avant-garde, his experiments with surrealism and his trailblazing interests in the city\u2019s demimonde and what we would today call street art \u2013 though labelled \u201cgraffiti\u201d, these scratchings into the stone walls of the city bear an intriguing resemblance to ancient rock art. The design, by architectural firm Bright, is suitably modernist \u2013 unembellished and largely monochromatic. The photographs are hung at eye level, their natural timber frames set against night-black walls, except for the \u201cParis by Day\u201d room, bedecked in diurnal white. Several works, including 1932\u2019s Escalier de Montmartre (Au chien blanc), are blown up across suspended banners, exposing intriguing details \u2013 Brassa\u00ef has, we can see, given one of the dog\u2019s ears the faintest of touch-ups.<\/p>\n
There are some surprising flourishes. In a room dedicated to Brassa\u00ef\u2019s connections with Andr\u00e9 Breton\u2019s surrealist movement, visitors are invited to sit on stools and gaze into peepholes that reveal an iterative series of works, described by the artist as \u201cTransmutations\u201d, created by engraving images on exposed glass negatives. Alongside the vaguely surrealist butterfly wings, flower petals and female nudes of this series are intimate scenes from Picasso\u2019s Paris and Boisgeloup studios, one depicting the cubist painter\u2019s hand in close-up as it provocatively daubs over a newspaper headline about a Catholic priest. One peephole looks out onto Heide\u2019s leafy grounds, a nod perhaps towards Brassa\u00ef\u2019s affinity with the natural world.<\/p>\n
A final room houses a projection of the artist\u2019s sole film, the 21-minute Tant qu\u2019il y aura des b\u00eates, which won an award at Cannes in 1956 and screened at the 1958 Melbourne Film Festival. Sadly, the film \u2013 shot at the Paris Zoo but described by the artist as \u201ccloser to animated design than a documentary\u201d \u2013 wasn\u2019t set up for viewing during the media preview I attended. Kinetic, fast-cut and occasionally dreamlike, it renders the movement of the zoo\u2019s animals as a kind of ballet, and features much use of Mickey Mousing, whereby the score synchronises exactly with the onscreen action. It can be watched in full on Vimeo.<\/p>\n
The artist\u2019s most iconic images are present and correct, from Autoportrait, Brassai photographiant la nuit boulevard Blanqui (1931-32) to Couple d\u2019amoureux dans un petit caf\u00e9 (circa 1932). While the artist once described his oeuvre as \u201ca study of customs through photography, a social study of underground Paris\u201d, his gaze emerges from these photographs as a humanist rather than coldly anthropological one, rendering the lives of sex workers, petty criminals, street cleaners and socialites equally deserving of witness. All speak to the expressive possibilities of photography, as well as to the medium\u2019s role in exposing divisions of class and social station.<\/p>\n
Perhaps no modern city has been as reproduced or mediated as much as Paris, yet Brassa\u00ef\u2019s photographs \u2013 even when of such fixtures of the cultural imaginary as the Eiffel Tower or Arc de Triomphe \u2013 resist the kind of kitschification that has befallen the works of many of his contemporaries. In Tour Eiffel (1929), the earliest photograph here, the famous lattice iron tower is framed by a distant fence, lending greater significance to the photographer\/viewer\u2019s subjectivity than the object itself, resplendent in its after-dark illuminations though it is.<\/p>\n
Photographs, Susan Sontag contended, slice out moments and freeze them, testifying to \u201ctime\u2019s relentless melt\u201d. Perhaps, but Brassa\u00ef\u2019s photographs reanimate a lost time with startling immediacy, in the process exerting a powerful, if paradoxical, nostalgic pull for an age almost beyond living memory. They continue to resonate because they are beautiful, their formal excellence undiminished by their relative technological primitiveness. If anything, in fact, it struck me that Brassa\u00ef\u2019s images have only benefited from the passage of time, their supremely artful composition and production today evincing all the humanising imperfections of pre-digital photography.<\/p>\n
As Henry Miller, a friend of the artist, put it: \u201cJust as a thousand diverse types may write automatically and yet only one of them will bear the signature of Andr\u00e9 Breton, so a thousand men may photograph the Cemetery Montmartre, but one of them will stand out triumphantly as Brassai\u2019s.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n
Brassa\u00ef: Secret Paris is showing at Heide Museum of Modern Art until November 15.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Born Gyula Hal\u00e1sz in Brass\u00f3, Hungary (today Bra\u0219ov, Romania), in 1899, Brassa\u00ef \u2013 meaning \u201cfrom Brass\u00f3\u201d \u2013 studied…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":578319,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[307,304,305,306,308,93,61,60],"class_list":["post-578318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-arts-and-design","tag-arts","tag-arts-and-design","tag-artsanddesign","tag-artsdesign","tag-design","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=578318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/578318\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/578319"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=578318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=578318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=578318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}