Photographic Inspirations: Brassaï, Paris After Dark (1932/3)

This is the first of a series of posts in anticipation of the publication of my novel with photographs, Push Process, on 6 March. In these posts, I'll discuss some of the photographers who influenced the images in my novel, and I'll also review some previous visual representations of Venice, where the book is set.

Today I'm discussing Brassaï, who was the immediate inspiration for me to take photographs of Venice at night, after I went to see the exhibition ‘Brassaï the Soul of Paris’ at the Hayward Gallery in London in early 2001. In Push Process, about two-thirds of the images are similarly night scenes – the daylight images were initially only a minor part of my photographic project. 

Nowadays, Brassaï's best-known images are of the Parisian demi-monde of the 1930s, taken in bars, private clubs and at least one brothel. Some of these were published in his second book, Voluptés de Paris [Pleasures of Paris] (1935), but he was disappointed with the salacious way they were presented there, and they weren't republished until a retrospective compilation, The Secret Paris of the 30’s, came out in 1976. But it was his architectural views I tried to emulate, and these feature most prominently in his first book, Paris de Nuit [Paris After Dark] (1932/3).

There’s a video on Vimeo showcasing a copy of the first French edition of this work, which was published by Arts et Métiers graphiques, an illustrated periodical, in December 1932. The cover includes a reference to a series of which this particular publication formed a part, along with the name of the series editor, which suggests that Arts et Métiers graphiques had a regular book-publishing arm, perhaps as a kind of ongoing supplement to the magazine. Interestingly, Brassaï's name is displayed at the same size as that of the series and editor, and greater prominence is instead given to the name of the writer of the introduction (and perhaps the image captions as well): Paul Morand. He presumably had a higher profile in 1932 than the then-unknown photographer, but at this date there also may have been some reluctance on principle to list a photographer as the book's main author (rather than its illustrator). 

The format of this first edition is unusual in several respects, not only compared to the other titles I’ll be discussing, but also compared to the Thames & Hudson English reprint of Paris After Dark from 1987, which I consulted for this post, and which was in turn based on a new French edition from Flammarion. 

The 1932 French edition has a ring binding, and a soft cover flush with the page edges. So it’s really a long booklet rather than a conventional book. Inside, the 62 images plus endpapers are all printed full bleed on pages whose dimensions faithfully reproduce the 3:2 ratio of the original images, which were taken with a 6x9cm camera on individual glass plates. This poses no problems for the images in portrait orientation; the ones in landscape orientation are rotated ninety degrees to fit the available space. In other words, when viewing this edition, you’d have to turn the book around and back again repeatedly. This last aspect of presentation would be unusual now, but was I think less so at the time.

Morand’s introduction is presented with some nice Modernist typography, and is followed by a list of extended explanatory captions, which don't have a credit as such. The 1987 edition says 'Text by Paul Morand' on the title page, but his name appears again at the end of the introduction (which might imply his contribution ends there). The captions feel consistent with his introduction, but if he wrote them, he certainly consulted with Brassaï on the specifics of the subject matter. In both editions, the images are then printed one per page on facing spreads with no adjacent text at all.

The reproduction method for the images was photogravure. This involved adding fake grain to the printing-plate surface and then transferring the image by a version of engraving. The results are slightly disconcerting – at least in this instance – precisely because they resemble engravings as much as photographs. The fake grain makes everything look smoky or foggy (that is, when the scene depicted is not literally foggy, which several of them are). When combined with the aesthetics of Brassaï’s night scenes, including solid blocks of black tone, limited depth of field and diffuse, often hidden, light sources, the results are as much Pictorialist as they are Modernist. It's no surprise then that a committee headed by Peter Henry Emerson, one of the most distinguished Pictorialists, gave a bronze medal to Paris After Dark.

From what I can tell online, the first English edition of February 1933 appears to have the same format as the 1932 French edition, but the Thames & Hudson reissue from 1987 presents the images rather differently, though probably in the same manner as the Flammarion republication it was based on. It preserves the selection and order of elements from the first edition, but the translated introduction is typeset more conventionally (in what looks like Gill Sans). It's again followed by the captions, but here these are accompanied by thumbnail versions of the images to which they apply. The selection and order of the images is the same as in the 1932/3 edition, but here they are all in their correct orientation, and with large black borders, set within larger pages with a very heavy paper stock: in fact, each page has a glossy black strip around the image and then a matt black background outside that. Thus:

An editorial note says that the 1987 edition was (where possible) 'produced by photogravure from Brassaï's original plates', which I initially assumed meant they used the photogravures from the first edition, but I think by 'plates' they actually mean the original negatives, which were on glass: i.e. Flammarion redid the gravures. However, Thames & Hudson seem to have used the original English translation of the text, since it has no separate copyright notice, and the translator is named as Stuart Gilbert, who died in 1969.

Photobooks often have introductions written by others, and Morand’s is typical of many subsequent examples in that it never refers directly to the photographs at all, but only to the subject matter and larger theme. Morand starts by invoking the literary tradition of Baudelaire, and the more recent ideas of Surrealism, in which night represents the city’s unconscious.

Night is not the negative of day; black surfaces and white are not merely transposed, as on a photographic plate, but another picture altogether emerges at nightfall. At that hour a twilight world comes into being, a world of shifting forms, of false perspectives, phantom planes. … The dangers I refer to are not those which a romantic tradition has innocently fostered … what I am thinking of is the more authentic menace of the subconscious mind of the French race, the night-side of their daytime perspicacity, all the more copious for being repressed beneath apparent equilibrium. … Julian Green, in “Derelicts”, has rendered with consummate skill his vision of the Paris night as a tremendous shipwreck, where all things suffer a sea-change …

“In all great cities there are zones which reveal their true character only after dusk. By day they wear a mask, assume a look of amiable good-fellowship that hoodwinks even the astute. … But when the nightmists rise, such places wake to life that is a parody of death; the smiling banks turn livid, dark surfaces grow pale and flicker with funereal gleams, coming with evil glee into their own again. It is the street-lamp that works the transformation. Under the first ray of this nocturnal sun, the nightscape dons its panoply of shadows and a malefic alchemy transforms the textures of the visible world. …”

Or, as Brassaï himself subsequently put it: '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.'

In her 1996 book on Brassaï: Images of Culture and the Surrealist Observer, Marja Warehime explains the role of Surrealism here in more detail:

perhaps one of the most telling examples of the differences separating the “new vision” of the Bauhaus from that of the Surrealists is their conception of the city. While the Bauhaus envisioned the city as a beautiful, coherent, finished technical object without ambiguities - … the Surrealist city is characterized by its irrationality: its spatial and psychological ambiguities, its zones of shadow and its labyrinth of streets and passageways through which the Surrealist passes on foot [i.e. not by train or car, or any other machine], oriented only by a sense of possible discovery. (12)

As we’ll see, this description fits some of Paris After Dark. But Morand's introduction, having invoked this surreal world of dreams, nightmares and mysterious transformations, then changes tack and proposes a rather different basis for conceptualising and organising much of what follows. He does so by introducing the figure of local guides who offer tours of ‘Paris by Night’ to interested visitors. In other words, the central theme is immediately rendered conventional and as part of an existing cultural economy, and while Morand then offers his own itinerary as (perhaps) a more authentic version of such a tour, he nonetheless preserves the sense of a world in which such tours have a proper place.

A more accurate description of this aspect of the book – featured both in the rest of the introduction, and in the separate captions, which do refer directly to the images, or at least to their subjects – might be ‘The Night Shift of Paris’. The demi-monde figures who populate Brassaï’s later books are largely absent, and so there’s little sense of an entirely separate world of the type we’ll later encounter in Ed van der Elsken’s Love on the Left Bank (1956). Instead the night-time economy is connected to the larger life of the city, and everything has its proper place and function within that larger life. So some of the people featured in these photographs perform essential tasks invisible in the daytime, such as the ‘scavengers’, who pumped out septic tanks in an age before a universal plumbing system, or the farmers who brought produce directly to the early morning markets in an age before supermarkets and plastic packaging. Other images depict a baker and a newspaper printer, who worked at night so their products could be ready for the city’s early risers. And still others show the nightwatchmen and rag-pickers who existed on the fringes of the world of work, or rough sleepers and homeless people who didn’t perform any particular task but still had an acknowledged place within the typology of urban society. 

The demi-monde occasionally appears, but not as a separate subculture – rather, as a site for the wider city’s entertainment, whether licit (circus and revue performers) or illicit (a single image of a streetwalker; another couple of brothel exteriors, including one of Chez Suzy, whose interior and employees will show up in more detail in the later books). The upper-class customers for these various performances also feature, for their custom allowed others to earn a living.

Gerry Badger, in the first volume of his collaboration with Martin Parr, The Photobook: A History, describes Paris After Dark as 'rooted' in the tradition of the '"day-in-the-life" type of picture essay developed by the illustrated magazines', even if the emphasis here is on a specific segment of the day, i.e. the night. For Badger, the book is 'an extended magazine picture story rather than a social documentary project' (120).

In keeping with this conception, all the people depicted are presented as types. Many are completely anonymous in the sense of being (deliberately) shot from behind or at a distance. There are only two images that could be described as portraits: both of elderly women (plates 32 and 43). The first is of ‘a spectral beggar-woman who in her decline has kept a hint of former grandeur’ (as the caption puts it); the second a famous image of an ‘ancient cocotte’ in a bar, who ‘looks as if she had stepped out of one of Baudelaire’s most night-marish pages’. The combination of caption and image here makes for uncomfortable reading/viewing, as the approach seems to emphasise and exploit the subjects’ vulnerability. To put this another way, the book – or at least the captions – do not seem to admit the possibility that the subjects of these images might be interested in their own representation. But it's not clear  to me if Brassaï or Morand wrote these captions: the former was certainly unhappy with the texts used for his second book. In any case, these two portraits are isolated instances: all the other images preserve a respectful distance. Some of the solitary (male) pedestrians, and certainly the man ringing the doorbell at Chez Suzy, were in fact Brassaï’s collaborators, who he directed and placed within the scene.

Although Morand’s initial written tour through the city doesn’t refer to the photographs directly, the introduction nonetheless makes several allusions to the subjects of particular images, though it doesn’t do so systematically, or follow the order in which they are presented by the photographs. For instance, the following passage surely refers to the woman depicted in plate 32:

I walk home across the Boulevards. Not a soul in sight — except some ancient ladies lolling on the benches; their French is flawless, cultured, they have obviously “seen better days”; sometimes an aristocratic profile shows above a tawdry stole make of a hundred scraps of rabbit-fur sewn end to end.

The captions are more explicitly descriptive than the introduction, and are I think entirely conventional instances of the kinds of commentary one might find accompanying any photojournalism of the period. In other words, they insist that the photographs are rational, and that their primary purpose is as illustrations. A couple of photographs of statues also serve as a pretext for evoking the longer history of Paris by reference to their memorialised subjects. But while several images can indeed be read in this way, others exceed or are at least less constrained by these attempts to fix their meaning, and as such are closer to Morand’s opening Surrealist statement of intent. These images show defamiliarised daytime landscapes: closed and barred parks and cemeteries, bridges, quays, and various landmarks shrouded in darkness or silhouetted by artificial lighting. The several images of train stations, railway infrastructure and the metro are perhaps somewhere in-between these two categories: they are defamiliarised landscapes, but also an explicable part of the larger economic infrastructure of the city. 

A lot of photojournalism shares this anxiety about controlling possible readings of the images with accompanying text. One of the innovations of Walker Evans's American Photographs (followed by most of the other photographers we'll be discussing) was to remove this textual apparatus, not incidentally promoting the photographer to sole author in the process. A photograph, Robert Frank later said, should 'nullify explanation'. 

All the images in Paris After Dark depict the central areas of the city. The presence of the railways and the representatives of the city’s wider economy make clear how dependent the centre is on the suburbs, but the suburbs only exist to service the centre. They’re not a subject in their own right (as they would become in Robert Adams's The New West, to be discussed in a later post).

Night photography was a very inexact science in the 1930s. Emulsions were slow, and subject to a technical issue known as reciprocity failure in low light that necessitated even longer exposures than those indicated by a light meter. For his images in bars, the ones published later, Brassaï used flash and planned in advance. Outside, he usually resorted to long exposures on a tripod. Part of the Brassaï myth is that he calculated the length of these exterior shots by the amount of time it took to smoke a cigarette. But others are clearly under a second, and likely in the range of 1/15 to 1/4 of a second, since they record the presence of pedestrians and cars with minimal blurring. 

In The Photobook, Badger rhapsodises about the printing of the first edition of Paris After Dark, which he describes as:

arguably the most luscious gravure ever seen, the blacks being so rich and deep that after handling the book one expects to find sooty deposits all over one's fingers. The gradation of tones is wonderfully subtle, describing an apparently infinite range of black and near-black tones. The layout, with its characteristic full-page bleeds, never more felicitously employed, takes us from image to image, from page to page, and across night-time Paris, with effortless panache. (134)

Well, yes and no. Some of the exteriors are barely there, reduced to isolated highlights against a black background. But we might put this in positive terms by saying the images commit fully to the theme. In other words, night is their principal subject as well as the organising theme of the book, and they evoke this subject by means of chiaroscuro gloom rather than lucid description. 

With regard to the sequencing, sometimes the paired images on facing pages complement each other in a pointed way, either by linking two images with related subjects, or by implicitly contrasting subjects – and sometimes the argument continues serially over several sets of such pairs. Consider the following sequence of page/plate numbers: 

23: two wandering cats; 24: a canoodling couple on a park bench in the Tuileries 

25: a man waiting at the door of Chez Suzy; 26: rough sleepers lying at intervals under a colonnade

27: a street of hotels catering to sex workers and their clients; 28: two policemen on bicycle patrol

29: the 'scavanger' pumping out cess pools; 30: a solitary streetwalker waiting for customers 

One might even see the following as part of the same progression:

31: the Montmartre cemetery seen through locked gates; 32: the noble beggar-woman referred to above. 

Even so, overall the precise sequence and order of the images does not quite have the same pointedness that it does in, say, American Photographs by Walker Evans, as we'll see in a later post dedicated to that title. That kind of larger argument perhaps seemed less important because the overall theme of Paris After Dark was so insistent and unitary. 

Things look different at night: that’s the banal basis for the effect of defamiliarisation. But it’s perhaps worth stating more clearly how this difference works. Space in a photograph is defined and described by the distribution of light, and at night, light is not just scarcer, it’s of an entirely different quality to natural light. It comes from multiple, isolated sources, which are situated within the landscape of the city, rather than positioned at an infinite distance above it. It never envelops the entirety of the scene.  

When I began photographing in Venice, I quickly realised that I didn’t share Brassaï’s commitment to his theme. Although I was working in low light, I wanted to describe things as clearly as possible. Writing about a photograph by Eugène Atget, Gerry Badger says that ‘Every square centimetre of the picture space, from edge to edge, works for its living …’ This is not the case for the images in Paris After Dark, where significant areas of some of the gravures are solid black. So, while I was interested in how working at night could slow down my approach and defamiliarise the city, I wasn’t interested in night as a subject in itself in the way that Brassaï was. Or at least, not as a subject whose sole identifying characteristic was chiaroscuro. In fact, I overexposed many of my images, especially the ones I later began to take in daylight, but also some of the night-time shots. Partly this was an error of technique (for reasons I need not go into here), but partly it was out of a desire to avoid areas of blank tone. And while I had a sense of how individual images might contribute to a larger portrait of the city, I didn’t think in the typological terms that Brassaï did. Atget, and, even more so, Walker Evans, were ultimately more useful models. But Morand’s tours, which presented spectacle and culture as just another commodity, along with the larger histories suggested by Brassai’s images of statues and landmarks, both find an echo in my work.