Brassai. Paris by Night

Roaming Paris streets by night in the early 1930s, Brassai created arresting images of the city's dramatic nocturnal landscape. The back alleys, Metro stations, and bistros he photographed are by turn hauntingly empty or peopled by prostitutes, laborers, thugs, and lovers. Paris by night, first published in French as Paris de nuit in 1932, collected sixty of these images, which have since become photographic icons. Original and subsequent editions of the book are highly sought after by collectors. For Brassai, 1932 and 1933 were the most important years in his life: they were the years in which he met Picasso, published Paris by Night - his first book - and collaborated with the Surrealists on the magazine Minotaure. But he distinguished himself from the Surrealist group by commenting, "The surreal effect of my pictures was nothing more than reality made fantastic through a particular vision. All I wanted to express was reality, for nothing is more surreal." The strange, bewitching poetry of Paris by Night faithfully embodies this credo.

Interest in Brassai's work has been fuelled in recent years by major retrospective exhibitions of his work at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, at the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, and at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Complementing the catalogues of his work that accompanied these shows, and publishing to coincide with the exhibition Brassai: The Soul of Paris (Hayward Gallery, London, 22 February to 13 May 2001), this long-overdue reissue of Paris by Night in photogravure brings one of Brassai's finest works back into print.