Category: arts and letters

Brassai

[This post was originally slated for my photo blog, but perhaps this is an obsession that can be appropriately shared with the family audience as well.]

Looking back at my Dew Drop Inn posting of the other day — one of those things that I had entirely forgotten until stumbling across the old negatives in my archive revival project — I wanted to add the comment that there is a long tradition of such subject matter in the history of photography.

Brassai on boulevard Saint-Jacques, 1931
Brassai on boulevard Saint-Jacques, 1931
If you had to ask me for the name of my favorite photographer ever (something that might, of course, be subject to daily change depending on mood and other factors), I would probably be most likely to say Brassai. Gyula Halász (his real, Hungarian name) came to Paris in his early twenties and documented life around him until he died in about 1984. Brassai is probably best known for his photographs of Paris after dark in the 1930s. He photographed people in bars and restaurants, lovers, dancers, prostitutes, pimps, brothels, street scenes and much more. He fell in with the art and literary crowd and became a friend of luminaries such as Picasso, Dali, Matisse, Giacometti, Jean Genet and Henry Miller.

Here are just a couple of sample pages from one my prized Brassai books (which includes work from material such as “The Secret Paris of the 30s”, “Paris By Night”, etc., along with written material by himself and others.

Brassai also made some wonderful photographs of … cats!

Paris.

I previously posted some photography of Paris by Ed Clark.  Probably the earliest photographs of that city that remain fixed in my consciousness are those of Eugene Atget, particularly his large-format view camera work of Paris streets and parks at night, and of Paris architecture, done in the late 1800s and early pre-war 1900s. Another of my all-time favorites, Atget could be the subject of a separate post. Brassai and Atget both tapped similar subject matter: street people, prostitutes and so on. I have never seen Paris, and would be almost reluctant to do so, as I fear the Paris of my mind, the Paris of Brassai, may no longer exist.

Photogrammar

Photogrammar is a Yale online project site for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).  I quickly discovered about 100 photographs of Monona County, Iowa — where I spent most of my childhood — on the site, made by later-renowned photographers Russell Lee (famously documented Japanese-American internment during WWII) and John Vachon (noted for his photos of Marilyn Monroe, among others).  The Monona County photographs are dated about one year prior to my birth.  Here are a few examples.

I also came upon hundreds and hundreds of FSA photographs from eastern Oregon made by legendary photographer Dorothea Lange, like this:
dorothea_lange_8b35081v

Thanks to photographer friend, John, for alerting me to Photogrammar.

Venice – Dogtown Postscript

I’ve been (surprisingly) getting a fair amount of feedback on my old Venice image resurrections.  Some is from old friend and ex-UCLA-colleague, John, who tells me that he was coming of age then in the Dogtown (aka Venice) skateboarding culture era.   Along with many fascinating details of the sport, the music of the time, Venice itself and his own youth as a skateboarder, he reminds me of the 2001 documentary, narrated by Sean Penn, of the skateboarding scene in Venice in the 1970s.  Here’s the trailer (and I will try to see if it can be viewed online in its entirety somewhere — perhaps YouTube):