Essential Guide to Brassaï's Paris Photography: What You Need to Know About His Iconic Shots Before Visiting
Photographing the City of Lights using a Master Photographer's Methods
“I've always had a horror of specialization in any one medium. That is why I have constantly changed my medium of expression —photo, drawing, cinema, writing, theater decor, sculpture, engraving.”—Brassaï
Brassaï was more than a photographer. Born at the dawn of the Twentieth Century, he was an artist of all trades. He engaged in other creative pursuits and ran the span of photography genres from gritty street photography at night to gorgeous daytime landscapes of the French countryside.
Taking Brassaï’s photography and emulating it digitally doesn’t do this excellent photographer justice. But, heck, he brought ideas to those outside his generation that any photographer can create compelling subjects, objects, composition, perspective, light, and shadow.
Photographer Brassaï (Gyula Halász) was born in Transylvania, though he lived in Paris most of his life. His most famous works come from his book Paris de nuit (Paris by Night). Brassaï photographed everyone from the poor and disenfranchised to the wealthy elite. His images include a flamboyant woman inside a cafe, a statue in the fog at the park, and a lamp-lined staircase.
Each is a work of art in shadow and light. His misty street scenes and shadowy ladies of the night figures captivated the Paris art world. Later in his life, he photographed painters Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dali. Brassaï was also a filmmaker and a writer. His film Tant qu'il aura des bêtes won an award at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956.
Imitating Brassaï’s Paris at Night
Night comes once a day, yet many of us never explore its cracks and crevices, the outer world of beaming light and the darkness of the barely lit underworld. It’s true—photographers do photograph frequently at and before dawn and at and after dusk.
Their mission is to get that navy blue sky at twilight and light trails from vehicular traffic that makes fog glow, but night, when it’s pitch black and when you get a not-so-compelling black background, discourages many from going out. But if you don’t go out at night, you miss Brassaï-type photo ops. Brassaï was a master of nighttime photography. He wasn’t afraid of anything that would come his way.
Since I love Paris after the rain, the wet cobblestone appeals to catching a sense of a slippery texture, each stone brick reflecting its unique level of soft, glowing glare. It’s as if you can observe the evaporation process.
In his Paris by Night series shot in the 1930s, Brassaï photographed nighttime Paris. His photo feats can be achieved in any world-class Western city by emulating the risky shot of moving subjects at night. With more than a few concerns, I repeated what he did, only in Berlin in 2008.
As a photographer writing about ways to emulate twentieth-century masters, I did not miss an opportunity to capture the underworld on the street at night. Its luring camp makes for stunning shots. Brassaï photographed several Paris call girls at night.
When he did, he’d place the subject prominently in the frame with a night shadow stretching from her feet along the ground below. His technique was simple—he shot them using a flash. Today, with high ISO speeds, you can avoid using a flash.
Generally, call girls are unwilling subjects. If you photograph them as Brassaï did (up close with a flash), you’re liable to get yelled at or worse. I confess that I did get yelled at, and it could have been worse, so a shot of a call girl is best taken from a distance—and even then, it’s not entirely safe.
Misty street scenes with Paris’ famous metal chairs, durable enough to sit outside year after year, are the type of chairs seen in photographs by many French masters. I caught this on 35mm black and white film a few decades ago.
Vistas from up above can undoubtedly be Brassaï representations.
The streets were puddled, the headlights’ rays creating another dimension on the boulevard. I aimed my camera through a misty rainfall. The Brassaï’-type light and shadowy capture from above stunned me from my vantage point in the air and continues to do so when scrutinizing the photo.
Brassaï had similarly framed the Luxor Obelisk, Egypt’s gift to France in 1836, from a balcony, which he shows in dark tones in the foreground. I got my shot from the top of a Ferris wheel (at the bottom left of the frame, you can see the lit guardrail of the Ferris wheel carriage).
Paris at night from above can be shot with high ISO speeds for a sharper shot. This type of shot is much less dramatic than one taken at a slow shutter speed because the quick capture doesn’t accentuate the lights to make them appear like shining stars.
To get the photo to look like Brassaï’s, I first tweaked the exposure in Photoshop Raw. I used the slider to overexpose the photograph slightly, as Brassaï’s is somewhat overexposed. Then I added a little fill light. The last of the color tweaks was lowering the contrast to almost the lowest value it would go (–46). This diffused the light so you could see a better reflection of the cars’ headlights on the wet lanes of the boulevard.
Next, I converted to grayscale by checking the Convert to Grayscale box in the HSL/Grayscale window of Photoshop Raw. I then tweaked the color sliders (grayscale after converting to black and white) to reflect maximum light from the pavement surfaces.
To make the frame sepia, navigate to Mode > RGB Color in the main Photoshop program. Then navigate to Adjustments > Color Balance and tweak colors to match the sepia tones in Brassaï’s photographs.
Graffiti’s Grit
Brassaï created a series of photographs that he took over a 30-year period in which he recorded graffiti on the walls of Paris. These images were exhibited at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 1957. Brassaï wrote of graffiti: “Standing alone and naked, like a conscript in front of a recruiting board, it should be allowed to be its judge.
“Standing alone and naked, like a conscript in front of a recruiting board, it should be allowed to be its own judge.” — Brassaï on graffiti.
Brassaï’s graffiti was nothing like what’s done today. It doesn’t suit America’s newer architecture, and in other parts of the world, if you took a chisel to a building’s surface, you’d be arrested. In turn-of-the-century Paris, the authorities overlooked that sort of thing, especially if it wasn’t overtly destructive.
Capturing graffiti is an easy way to bring out expressive art from the streets — an act of contempt for many, which is a launching pad for conveying messages that express myriad feelings. Brassaï opted to capture graffiti representing surrealist art forms, shapes, and forms that caught the attention of Picasso and Miró, avid collectors of the photos. Many of these images contained simple lines and forms — some merely odd-shaped heads with eyes, mouth, and nose.
Brassaï sought out the graffiti first and then would photograph it when the light was right — something you don’t have to do with today’s digital cameras, where you can tweak everything from exposures to shadows and highlights.
To emulate Brassaï’s work, you can scout out graffiti in cities where its presence isn’t shunned as in many American cities. Cities in Europe, Asia, and South America have many places to shoot all kinds of graffiti. Berlin is one fine spot for art in many forms, including scrawling with a surrealistic bent in the image above. Note the simplistic faces and the odd shapes and lines that comprise the features.
LOL at the circular Pacman-like face peering at the luscious lips of a giant cat-like cubist figure.
Brassaï shot graffiti of simple faces made with odd shapes and forms similar to that of Picasso’s Owl. I have drawn a replica of Picasso’s owl above. It’s pretty similar. However, it’s not Picasso.
Studying the graffiti-filled frame above, you see similar lines—a creation of sprite characters by an unknown graffiti artist.
Framing is essential when shooting graffiti — you don’t want too much in one frame. Much of the time, you won’t find an isolated graffiti figure. You will discover various scrawling by different artists together on one wall. To have a compelling photograph, you’ll have to frame only one part of the wall on which the graffiti was drawn.
Regarding camera settings, it depends on the light cast upon it when graffiti is shot. When the sun shines on the work, I use a medium-sized aperture (f/5.6–9) to pick up the color. When I find graffiti in the shade, my first concern is getting a soft image, so I use as wide an aperture as my lens will allow — usually on the order of f/2.8–4.
Tweaking the images in Photoshop gives me a lot of leeway in changing the color contrasts so that even if I shot some bright-colored graffiti in the shade on a cloudy day, I could still make the colors compelling when I work with the image in Photoshop Raw.
After you take a few shots of some graffiti or simple images, compare them to the paintings of Miró and Picasso, and you’ll see many similarities in the shapes and forms.
A Photoing Vist to Cirque d'Hiver, the Old-fashioned Paris Circus
Brassaï photograph Trapeze artists, Medano Circus 1932 is an excellent opportunity to consider visiting a circus. The big tent offers a myriad of photographs. More than a decade ago, I visited Cirque d'Hiver, the old-fashioned Paris circus that has been around for generations. I have to say this was the best indoor photo op venue I’ve ever shot at.
Goosebumps appear on my body every time I look at them. They are priceless jewels that I had snapped two decades ago.
Paris (or Any Big City) at Night
Night comes once a day, yet many of us never get into it. It’s true—photographers do photograph frequently at and before dawn and at and after dusk. Their mission is to get that navy blue sky and light trails from vehicular traffic that blesses those times of day, but night, when it’s pitch black and when you get a not-so-compelling black background, discourages many from going out. But if you don’t go out at night, you miss Brassaï-type photo ops.
Brassaï was a master of nighttime photography. He wasn’t afraid of anything that would come his way. In his Paris by Night series, he photographed prostitutes ( at http://www.masters-of-photography.com/B/brassai/brassai_prostitute_full.html), misty street scenes, and vistas from up above.
Brassaï Takeaway
Visiting Paris is thrilling for this photographer. If you’ve never been, now is as good a time as any.
Knowing about Brassaï can take your photographs of Paris to a new height. And certainly don’t miss shooting at night.
Paris Circus Photos by Matthew Bamberg at Fine Art America
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