This contrast gave his printed images richness and depth and he called these prints his “little boxes of night.” Light reflected in wet streets and diffused by fog, would define shapes within the dark. Using his training as a painter, Brassaï framed his shots so that small areas of light pierced large areas of blacks and shadows. An article on Imaging Resource describes his technique: He also carried copies of his work to explain his late night activities to local law enforcement. Ingeniously, he used the varying lengths of his smokes, inevitably including a Gauloise, to time his exposures. His atmospheric landscape shots needed long exposures and were subjected to excessive contrast from street lights. It disturbs and surprises us with its strangeness.”Īs a self-taught pioneer of night photography in his adopted home of Paris (he was a Hungarian émigré), Brassaï faced the relatively new photographic challenges of working at night, equipped as he was with a Voigtlander 6.5 x 9cm camera, slow f4.5 lens and a wooden tripod. “Night does not show things, it suggests them. After Paris by Night, other photographers took to sustained nocturnal photography – Bill Brandt captured London in the late 1930s (it was Brassaï’s publisher who commissioned Brandt night time work) and Weegee did the same in New York in the 1940s. He was not the first to shoot at night – Alfred Stieglitz amongst others had worked at night previously, but he was the first to produce a substantial body of work. His most famous work ( Paris de nuit, 1933 and Voluptés de Paris 1935) opened up a dark realm that had only been captured by painters before.
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