But they were equally revered at the time. Another thing that made them strikingly different in their approaches to photography.
He processed his own film and made his own prints. Befriending hoodlums, laborers,pimps and streetwalkers allowed him an inside track on them all, including the nude girls at the Folies Begere. The Paris Underbellyīrassaï was a man of the common people of Paris. So bright that Picasso nicknamed him “the Terrorist.” But it’s what gave his images that special “Brassai” look. Not only was it blindingly bright, it was very loud. Dalí, Henry Miller, Picasso, Matisse, Giacometti and Jean Genet.įor flash lighting, like doing interior shots, he worked with an assistant and a flash powder gun. His somewhat fame as a photographer let him fall into a very elite crowd. (Leica) Brassai never used a 35mm camera, and was much more structured than Cartier-Bresson and his “decisive moment”.īrassaï shot with a large, fixed lens, 6.5×9 cm Voigtländer Berghei. First, as far as equipment goes, Cartier-Bresson was really always a 35mm guy. But to call them birds of a feather is quite erroneous. In a time of slow lenses and slower film.īrassai and Henri Cartier-Bresson dominated the field of photography pre-WWII. For the time, it was a technical mastery of shooting at night. It combined glowing city landscapes with documentary images of the bars, cafes and nightlife of Paris. Within 2 years he assembled these photographs in a book entitled “Paris by Night”. So he turned to a fellow Hungarian immigrant, André Kertész. His interest in photography was inspired by his long night time walks. He studied painting and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Hungary, but with Hungary in shambles after WWI, he left for Paris. The name he chose is just Hungarian for “from Braşov”, a region in Hungary. His real name was Halász Gyula, but it didn’t take him long to realize that was not a name that would easily promote his art. He was born in 1899 in what is today Hungary. It seemed Brassai and Paris nights were almost a synonym. Actually, it was the writer Henry Miller who started calling him “The Eye of Paris”.