Brassaï’s “Paris After Dark” : a review of his nocturnal work

Over the years he was working, Brassaï and his camera became known as the ‘eye of Paris’. His friend and contemporary Henry Miller wrote of him:

“Brassaï is a living eye… his gaze pierces straight to the heart of truths in everything”.

Brassaï was part of a vanguard of more socially engaged photographers, with his contemporaries producing similarly gritty shots of farmers, butchers, and back alleys. Along with Dorothea Lange (in America) and August Sander (in Germany), he was said to bring “a new humanistic ideal, and a poetical approach to photojournalism and documentary photography”.

A Happy Group: Bal des Quatre Saisons” (circa 1932)

Surrealism was carving its way through the contemporary art world at the time, with Cubism and Futurism as major influences in the early 20th century, and surrealist notes can be found in many of Brassaï’s best photographs, including this one. Brassaï's moody, evocative scenes of Paris and its nightlife tinkle with the chatter of intertwining lives, and the low hum of the big city.

This shot, “A Happy Group”, was taken early in his career as a photographer, which began in the late 1920s, and was prompted by his encountering the avant-garde artists of the ‘Minatoure’ Magazine. He had moved to Paris after the first world war, and began to move in its art circles with the likes of Picasso, Matisse, Miró and Dalí. It was perhaps his position in this world that so drew Brassaï to Paris’ underworld: prostitutes, transvestites, gangs, and opium dens. Along with the other Minatoure men, Brassaï depicted a parallel world that few wealthy Parisians knew, and became a regular at many disreputable establishments, like the “Bals Maisons” on the Rue de Lappe. This street was home to over a dozen dance halls, such as La Bastoche and Le Bal des Quatre Saisons (both pictured many times in Brassaï’s work), that played fast-paced jazz and waltzes to rowdy crowds.

By capturing the interiors of these establishments, Brassaï offers us a view from the regular’s seat. He wrote of the night: “Night does not show things, it suggests them. It disturbs and surprises us with its strangeness. It liberates forces within us which are dominated by our reason during the daytime.” His use of stark contrast in his developing and editing processes exposes the Parisian underworld, illuminating the dark corners of both the establishments he photographed, and the minds of his subjects.

The uncanny doubling in “A Happy Group” forces us to look at the photograph again. The mirroring of the subjects’ hand positions and body language on both sides of the table is disturbing, as it undermines the boundaries between individual characters within the shot. Brassaï’s work usually seeks strong characters, individuals like “Fat Claude” and “La Môme Bijou” (crossdressing or dripping with pearls respectively), whom the viewer would not quickly confuse with other subjects. The former director of the MoMA, John Szarkowski, wrote of his choice of subjects; “Brassaï shows a taste for the strange, the ambiguous, and the bizarre.” However, the subjects in this shot seem to have been deliberately chosen for their similarity to the ‘common man’. Their recognisable, contemporary look allows them to be vessels for a comment on society as a whole, rather than on them as individual characters. The people in “A Happy Group” seem comfortable in their conformation; black jacket, white shirt, black tie; dark jumper, white shirt: short hair all round.

Despite the photograph’s name, there is a tangible sense of melancholy in the room. The man in the foreground’s eyes turn down, and his hand, less relaxed than the other man’s, seems to hold onto his woman for support. They seem hesitant to express, faces paused somewhere between a smile and a frown. It is only the man who watches himself in the mirror who seems to express a real enjoyment of the night: perhaps it is a performance for the watching camera. None of the women make eye contact with each other. Like the wine and the cigarettes, they are at the table to entertain, to laugh at the young men’s jokes and ‘drug’ them into “happiness” with their presence. The French philosopher and semiotician Roland Barthes wrote of wine as a “converting substance, which is capable of reversing situations, […] making a weak man strong, and a silent one talkative”. The wine, the women, the cigarettes, and the mirror in this photograph all act as “converting substances”, as accessories to brighten the melancholy men. Many men in this period felt an intense guilt (“Survivors’ guilt”) at having outlived their fallen brothers, colleagues, and friends. It is perhaps this guilt that drives the men’s intense contact with the women they have their arms around. Contact with life is vital, to distract them from the ever-present trauma of witnessing death.

The mirror is another unmissable element in this shot. Like the things it shows, it is contradictory in its form. Does it show truth or illusion? Is it two or three dimensional? Brassaï seems intensely aware of the power of the camera to convert a moving reality into a stationary image: an illusion of life on a roll of film. The intended separation of planes in this shot seems almost surrealist, highlighting the feeling of existential insecurity, and is no doubt influenced by Brassaï’s involvement with artists like Salvador Dalí. The group is yanked out of a frame of reference, they have no stated names and even the date was neglected by Brassaï, and their expressions consequently seem to comment on both the losses of the past and the unknowns of the future. The mirror also divides the group with its lines: the line of reality versus mirrored reality, and the joining lines in the mirror as an object. It then pieces them back together like one of Picasso’s collages, a facsimile of coherent reality, the guilty men like bits of media, trying to blend in where they shouldn’t be.

The relationship between seeing and being seen is one much felt by the photographer. Especially in street photography, the desire to be invisible is a common one. The “Happy Group” do not look at Brassaï or his camera, and yet they seem to know they are being watched. The slight downward angle of the shot is reminiscent of some omnipotent God, peering inside the Bals Maisons and seeing the people behind the façade. Past the lipstick, and the hats, and the identical, trendy hair: the photographer aims to see past the “happy” exterior, and they seem to squirm under his gaze. All persons present divert their eyes from the camera. The eyes are often said to be the windows to the soul, and the characters in this shot have drawn the blinds.

Brassaï’s striking body of work is deeply influenced by the material and social contexts of the historical period it was produced in. It documents the highs and lows of Paris in the thirties, and contains some of the most memorable compositions and characters in early street photography. “A Happy Group” is an artefact of a place and time that sat between two devasting wars, and immortalises the experience of the common man. Brassaï’s desire to capture people at the edge of life led him to photograph people and places rarely favoured for the honour of photography, and to do it with a sympathetic eye. His “taste for the bizarre” allowed him to capture ambiguities in people’s natures that remain relatable to this day.

 By Tilda Hadley - English Pathway, Artistic Director

Bibliography:

Print:

Johnson, W. S. "Brassaï: Paris Nocturne." Choice, vol. 51, no. 6, (2014)

Roland Barthes, ‘Mythologies’. (Média Diffusion: 2015)

Websites:

https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/gallery/2019/oct/08/city-of-light-brassai-paris-in-pictures-photography

https://magazine.artland.com/brassai-the-eye-of-paris/

http://www.orgs.utulsa.edu/wwi/?q=content/survivors-guilt-testament-youth

https://magazine.artland.com/brassai-the-eye-of-paris/

Photographs:

Four photos from Brassai’s ‘Paris De Nuit’ (Paris: 1933).