“I invent nothing. I imagine everything. I have sought only to express reality, for nothing is more surreal” – Brassaï.
Walk with me through a foggy Parisian night. Pause. Watch the mist fall in gentle swirls wrapping the city in gossamer folds. Feel the damp upon your skin. Wander the streets in the liminal space between dusk and dawn. Meander along the banks of the River Seine lulled by the slapping of water on the shore, the flutter of falling leaves. Linger between dream and reality. Play in the light and shade. Look in ways you have not seen before. Wonder at the extraordinary of the quotidian. Pay homage to lives now long passed. The echo of a memory, revealing itself anew.
One of the most alluring aspects of the photograph is its capacity to transport the viewer to another world, to take us beyond what we know or to remind us of what we have forgotten. Nearly a century after Brassaï’s Secret Paris photographs were taken, they continue to fascinate. Compelling, rich with narrative and exuding the humanist qualities that underpinned this artist’s work, Brassaï’s photographs are undoubtedly some of the most arresting pictures of all time.
Entering the Brassaï’s Secret Paris exhibition at the Heide Museum of Modern Art (Melbourne) is to arrive at another time and place. Brassaï’s deep, emotional connection to the images he created, first in his mind and then on glass plates and as prints, are enthralling and profound. Each represents a moment, a life suspended in time, which for me encapsulates the enduring value of the medium. Yet these photographs transcend the notion of documentation, conveying a level of intimacy that is possible because of Brassaï’s ability to reach beyond the superficial and take us with him into his world.
To say I love Brassaï’s Secret Paris is to underplay the connection I feel to the ‘luminous years’ in which this polymath found his way to photography allowing generations to experience one of the world’s greatest cities in all its guises through his unique way of looking. To know Brassaï’s photography is to understand the difference between seeing and looking, and to meet in that place where intellect and imagination collide with reality. Brassaï’s photography forces you to give yourself up to what’s happening in the image and unprompted, let it do its magic. I have long admired Brassaï’s work, read his letters to his parents during the early years when he was struggling in Paris and spent time with his images. The Heide show is the first time I have stood amongst the vintage prints that Brassaï made in his “laboratoire” (darkroom) and it is a spine-tingling moment.
In 1899 Gyula Halász was born in the small Hungarian Transylvania town of Brassó. After studying fine arts in Budapest and Berlin, and serving in the military, in 1924 at the age of 25, he moved to Paris where he spent the rest of his life. It was at this time he adopted the name Brassaï. An artist who used a range of materials to convey his ideas, from writing and sculpture to photography, Brassaï is best known for the latter, a medium he embraced to express his insatiable curiosity about the human condition.
However, being a polymath comes with its own preoccupations and Brassaï longed for artistic freedom, writing that he would have liked to model himself in “the tradition of the seventeenth-century humanists, that is, those great figures of the Renaissance who were granted the right to develop, in harmony, all their talents in life and in the arts including thinking.” Brassaï lamented that “specialization, one of the first requirements – and calamities – of our modern era, has always been odious to me.” Nevertheless, for a good part of his adult life, Brassaï chose photography as his means of artistic expression, later returning to writing and sculpture. Where he suspends the notion of “specialization” is in his subject matter. Through his photographs we can see that Brassaï was captivated with life and its array of forms.
At the time Brassaï came to photography, Paris was a thrumming hub of artistic experimentation. Foreign artists congregated in low rent arrondissements, to spend their days nursing cups of black coffee in cafes, debating and exploring new ideas, theories, artistic methods and the existential questions of the time. This is a period romanticised by history, when the truth is that many struggled to survive, Brassaï included. The letters he wrote to his parents during this time evidence that trying to live a life true to oneself was tough.
As was the case with many aspiring artists (and remains true), Brassaï earned his living turning his hand to all manner of tasks, from reporting on the Olympic games to being a ghost writer, and caricaturist. From the moment he picked up a borrowed camera in 1929, he fell in love with the medium claiming he “saw photography as a way to uncover and record the world that surrounded me, the city in which I live, as comprehensively as possible.”
Early on he took pictures to accompany the articles he wrote for Hungarian and German magazines, journalism being his main source of income. But he quickly tired of photography’s “practical consideration.” Writing in the preface to Brassaï: Letters to my Parents, he notes “As soon as I learned to use the camera, I lost interest in having my pictures published as illustrations for commissioned articles. From the moment I realized that the camera was capable of capturing the beauty of the Parisian night (that beauty with which I had fallen passionately in love during my bohemian adventures), I pursued photography solely for my own enjoyment.” A sentiment that resonates with this author.
In those early years, Brassaï spent his nights “wandering about the city from Montparnasse to Montmartre…inspired to become a photographer by my desire to translate all the things that enchanted me in the nocturnal Paris I was experiencing.” Often these night tours were made alone, although on occasion the writer Henry Miller joined him, Miller labelling Brassaï “the eye of Paris.”
Many of the photographs that feature in this exhibition were published in Brassaï’s first monograph Paris de Nuit in 1933, a turning point in his photographic career. In the gallery are the vintage prints handmade by Brassaï as well as life-sized panels suspended from the ceiling, weighted down with chain and stone. The staggered hanging of these panels allows for a full immersion into the streets of Paris, the way Brassaï saw them. Moving back to adjust my gaze so I can see the panels align, allows an extraordinary view of the steps on which the little white dog stood, and to see the lights of Paris reflect in the River Seine through the arch of the Carrousel Bridge. To immerse in Brassaï’s Paris is a joy.
These large panels also reveal what Lesley Harding, the artistic director at Heide and a curator of the show, describes as “the artist’s hand,” elements that are imperceptible in the original prints. With images at such scale, we can see “where he’s marked up the negatives…the literal hand of the artist is present.” Seeing these marks on the prints gives further insight into Brassaï’s practice, his attention to detail, and are evidence of the meticulous work he did in his “laboratoire” exemplifying his intention to tell a story beyond documentation. It is fascinating to trace the handwork of Brassaï in the blown- up prints and then to look at the originals to see how the work he did in the darkroom presents in the final print.
“I like to turn a new page in my life with every day” Brassaï’ wrote, his innate curiosity evident in the breadth of subjects he photographed, from the fabulous La Môme Bijou au Bar de la Lune, Montmartre (c. 1932), one of my favourite portraits, to the Little White Dog, on the steps of Montmartre (1932). Architecture also drew his eye. The photographs of the gargoyles of Notre Dame keeping watch over Paris at night are haunting. Then there are the street walkers and brothel workers, the backstage antics at the Folies Bergère, lovers in cafes and children sailing boats on the Seine. Wherever he turned his gaze, Brassaï found moments that he crafted into compelling and enduring human narratives.
His love of humanity was fundamental to his artistic practice, says Philippe Ribeyrolles, his nephew and godson, who was in Melbourne for the opening of Brassaï ’s Secret Paris at Heide. Philippe grew up around Brassaï the youngster spending time in his uncle’s “laboratoire.” Brassaï had no children of his own and welcomed his nephew into his world. I ask if Brassaï’s photography shifted over time. No, explains Philippe, it was not the subject matter that changed, but rather the medium, Brassaï returning to his love of writing and sculpture in his later years. “Touch became an important part of his practice too,” says Philippe. “Feel, don’t look.” In Brassaï’s photography you can see his interest in sculpture also. In his series Transmutations, a collection of nudes, he explores form, lines, and contours, the sculptural aesthetics obvious in these abstract compositions.
As we chat at Heide, Philippe explains that Brassaï did not direct or instruct those he photographed but allowed the scene to unfold, both in his mind and in front of him. When he felt the time was right, then he pressed the shutter, a point at which the subject had forgotten Brassaï was there to take a picture. Despite the size of the cameras at that time, Brassaï ’s engagement with his subjects, his genuine interest in their stories, allowed any preoccupation with posing to fall away. It was at this moment he made his picture.
Brassaï ’s work is without guile or judgement, says Philippe. “My uncle photographed people and situations not only as he saw them, but as he emotionally perceived them.” Brassaï was a lover of humankind, someone who was interested in others’ stories, who felt deeply and used photography as a means of exploring his own emotionality. “He was a humanist,” says Philippe, “and an intellectual” deeply interested in the history of art, someone who read constantly and was inspired by the works of Proust and Goethe amongst others.
Brassaï’s knowledge, and appreciation for art is reflected in the portrait of Dali and Gala he made in 1933 at Villa Seurat, in Paris. Philippe tells that Brassaï knew that Dali loved Velázquez, so he drew on the composition of Las Meninas, painted in 1656, to frame his portrait of the pair. In Las Meninas the artist can be seen in a mirror in the background standing at his easel, and in the photograph taken of Dali and Gala, Brassaï is reflected in the mirror with his camera, an intentional structuring of the scene.
Mirrors appear frequently in Brassaï’s work, acting not only in a reflective capacity, but as a means of challenging perspective, both the artist’s and viewers. The mirror becomes a vehicle through which Brassaï shares what is in his imagination, his mind’s eye. For instance, in Philippe’s favourite piece, the image of the Folies Bergère backstage taken in 1932, a large mirror dominates in its obscurity. It is perhaps one of the most complex images, as it requires the viewer to pause for a long time and contemplate exactly what they are looking at, such is the intricacy of the scene, the angle from which it is shot (it looks like it was taken from the fly floor above the stage), and the enormous mirror that reflects a tableau at odds with reality. I can see why the image intrigues Philippe, but he tells that when he was first given the print as a child for Christmas, at the age of around eight, he was less than enthused. “A picture, great. Not a game?” he laughs.
The exhibition features several portraits of famous artists – Dali, Matisse, Maar, Miller, Giacometti – all of whom Brassaï became acquainted. However, portraits of Picasso dominate in this exalted group, and provide rare, and intimate insights into this artist’s life. The pair forged a lifelong friendship which began when they met during a photography commission Brassaï received from the groundbreaking Surrealist magazine Minotaure for its inaugural edition in 1932. Brassaï photographed Picasso in his studio along with various artworks, the latter at the time one of the world’s most revered artists, the former in the nascent years of his career. Over decades Brassaï photographed Picasso and in 1964 he published Conversations with Picasso an extraordinary book that documents his many wide-ranging discussions with the artist. The grouping of Brassaï’s images of Picasso allows a closer reading of the famous artist’s life and practices and his relationship with the photographer.
The exhibition also features viewing apertures that line the walls in a separate room affording a different type of engagement with the pictures. Sitting on a small stool, one can view an image without distraction from the periphery, which acts to slow down the act of seeing so that you can really look at what is depicted without external visual noise.
Brassaï comes to the Heide Museum of Modern Art following the success of recent headline shows, notably Lee Miller and the double bill, Man Ray and Max Dupain. Brassaï seemed a logical next step as Lesley Harding explains. Bringing Brassaï back to Melbourne after more than 40 years is influenced by the fact that there is “a real appetite” amongst audiences for modernist photography and there are new generations to introduce to his work. The familiarity of the landmarks in the City of Light, many of which still exist today, is also a drawcard for audiences.
In 1953, Jean Gallien wrote in Photo-Monde that Brassaï ’s photography paralleled the emotional power of literature such was his capacity to tell a compelling story, one that resonated and stayed in the audience’s mind.
“Humanism in photography is both an intellectual as well as an emotional endeavour,” wrote Bill Jay in The Romantic Machine in 1978. These qualities are clearly present in Brassaï Secret Paris the most expansive survey of his photography shown in Australia.
Alison Stieven-Taylor
Curated by Lesley Harding, Emmanuelle de l’Écotais and Philippe Ribeyrolles.
Brassaï photographs courtesy of Estate Brassaï Succession.
Brassaï : Secret Paris
until 15 November 2026
Heide Museum of Modern Art
7 Templestowe Rd,
Bulleen. VIC 3105, Australia
https://www.heide.com.au/
Entry free with Museum admission.
