This book is dedicated to the intense work of one of the 20th-century’s greatest photographers. It narrates the exceptional story of a passion for over fifty years that united Brassaï to the most hidden recesses of Paris as well as to all those intellectuals, artists, well-to-do families, whores and misfits who contributed to the city’s legendary fame. It will be an opportunity to discover the passionate work of this extraordinary artist who arrived in Paris during his childhood. For the rest of his life, Brassaï would hold this city as the source of his reflections and as the fil rouge to his oeuvre.
Born in 1899 at Brasso (modern-day Brasov) in Transylvania, Gyula Halász (he took the name Brassaï when he began photographing in 1929) was only four years old when he arrived in Paris with his father, who was a professor of literature and had been invited to spend a sabbatical year in the French capital. This period fascinated the young boy. Brassaï never forgot Paris, the “Ville des lumières”, and in 1924, after studying art in Berlin, he moves there.