Brassai photography style examples

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"Without heads or with reduced heads," as the art historian Sidra Stich observed, "the figures no longer offer evidence of their superior human status." Brassaï collaborated with different Surrealist authors, including Salvador Dali and André Breton, providing photographs for their articles (for Minotaure). Brassaï worked on the series for thirty years and eventually published a photo book on graffiti in 1961.

Brassaï continued to contribute to Minotaure and it was through his connection with the magazine that he would make the acquaintance of Man Ray and other Surrealist luminaries including Salvador Dalí, Paul Eluard and André Breton.

In 1933 he became one of the first members of the venerable Rapho agency, created in Paris by another Hungarian immigrant Charles Rado.

She looks straight into the camera, engaging the gaze of the photographer, and she is dressed-to-the-nines in her worn out clothes and jewels. It was Gyula's friend, the art dealer Zborowski, who introduced him to Eugène Atget, and it was on this most esteemed of Parisian street photographers that Brassaï began to model himself.

Like his father, Gyula, with his love for Paris and French manners found himself as welcome in aristocratic circles (to which his lover Madame Delaunay-Bellville had introduced him) as he was in the demi-monde of prostitutes and pimps.

Seen on its own terms, Brassaï's picture captures the warm and delightful atmosphere of "drag balls" that had become popular among the Parisian gay scene in the 1920s. His photographic achievements were also acknowledged with prestigious honors and even life-time achievement awards: namely the Gold Medal for Photography at the Venice Biennale (1957) and later the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (1974), and Chevalier de l'Order de la Legion d'honneur (1976) in France.

In the late 1950s, Brassaï bought a Leica and he photographed in color for the first time.

His nighttime scenes, brimming with shadow and mystery, often harbored a dreamlike quality that linked them closely to the movement.

Which Locations in Paris Are Prominently Featured in Brassaï’s Photographs?

Brassaï’s lens frequently focused on the Montparnasse district, known as a hub for artists and intellectuals.

This collection appeared in the young Swiss publisher Albert Skira's deluxe art magazine Minotaure, which first published in June 1933. In the fall of 1917, Gyula joined the Austro-Hungarian cavalry regiment, but did not see combat due to his sprained knee and having spent much of the war convalescing in a military hospital.

He is delighted by the portrait of him with his extraordinary stove, a portrait that later appeared in Life [magazine]"

The collection he produced of, and for, Picasso in 1943 was the photographer's main income at the time. She even inspired the creation of the main character in the French play The Madwoman of Chaillot in 1945.

The female nude may have been a subject he dealt with extensively in his drawings and sculptures, but his headless nudes held special appeal for the Surrealists. They are crowded-in by other dancing couples who compete for space on the dance floor but they are clearly enjoying the occasion. He is though best known as a photographer and for the ethereal quality - so admired by the Surrealists - that he brought to his images.

Brassaï was in fact one of the two most influential photographers in European photography of the 1930s.

Brassaï chose a larger-format Voigtländer camera with the aim of using a longer exposure time too, though this approach required a more calculated and thoughtful use of the camera and a special handling of lighting. Upon his arrival (in the February of that year) Gyula duly sought out his Berlin acquaintances. Fashionable society had loved to mingle with the Montparnasse 'riffraff' ever since the success of Josephine Baker and her Revue Négre and having one foot in high society and one foot in the Montparnasse night scene proved inspirational for his art.

Indeed, he took up work as a journalist for the Hungarian papers Keleti and Napkelet while attending the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin-Charlottenburg. As well as capturing the seedy side of Paris, Brassai also photographed the city's cultural elite at leisure, at the ballet or the grand opera. In 1948, he married Gilberte Boyer, a French woman, and had a solo exhibition at MoMA in New York, which afterwards travelled to the George Eastman House in Rochester NY, and the Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois.

His defining monograph, Paris by Night, contains his iconic nightscapes and is often regarded as his seminal work.

Late Period

In the latter part of his life, well into the 21st century, Brassaï’s acclaim continued to rise.