Customer Reviews

The Secret Paris of the '30s

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The photographs and stories in this book are truly remarkable. The underground world Brassai allows the reader to navigate is one that will leave a mark on your heart and tear at your soul. From lonely streetwalkers to the many faces of Parisian nightclubs, this amazing photographic journey gives a modern audience a true glimpse of what life was like in the 30s.

Divided into 19 sections, each including a short essay on one subject (ex.: The Street Fair) with accompanying illustrations. Photographs include full-page printed to the edge of the paper (unfortunately also to the spine of the book), full-page with border, half and quarter page. Copyrights on most of the the photographs, listed in an appendix, range from 1931-33, a few are 1934.

Most of the 150 photographs are very good duotone reproductions, a few are less than great. My copy is a softcover, publ. by Thames & Hudson, 2001, labeled Printed in Italy on the back cover.

The subjects range from public toilets and their various uses, through petty underworld figures, gay nightclubs, prostitutes and brothels, bums, to backstage at the Folie-Bergere and an upper-class opium den. One interesting section deals with the annual "Balls" (read orgies) organized by the Schools of Medicine and the Arts on the Left Bank for their students. All get a sympathetic and nonjudgemental treatment. Overall an fascinating, but fragmented glimpse of Paris night life in the early 30's.

Don't let the title put you off, there is very little in this book that would shock a modern audience. Times certainly ain't what they used to be. Brassai's photos and writings of a time now long gone however will slowly infuse in you a strange and somewhat uncomfortable nostalgia for a time long before you were born and places you wouldn't visit had you been born. Removed so far in time, it's all very safe - perhaps.

Brassai was a Hungarian photographer who walked around Paris in the 1930's with a heavy large format camera and recorded its street life. The text alone is worth it but the photographs of brothels and the then forbidden 'after dark' night life is all here in the text and the photographs. Without flash but using available light and exposures which were very difficult Brassai has become one of the best known photographers of the 1930's and beyond. All of his books are exceptional.

This was the second time I'd enjoyed this groundbreaking book-length photo essay by one of the pioneer French photojournalists. I'd first seen many of the very famous historic pictures when I was a student working on my BFA in the mid-1960's. I came across the book itself in the early 1970's but I don't think I read the text at the time because I seem to recall it was in French.
Having just finished actually reading this 1976 English translation I purchased, I'm even more impressed than I was long ago when I examined an earlier foreign version. Not only have the pictures themselves remained some of the best photographs of the era, but also they are still fresh and as relevant as they were at the time. The author-photographer liked to stroll through the dark alleys and byways of Paris with the likes of Man Ray, KiKi and Henry Miller among others. What impressed me most about this book at this time in my own life is that the photographer was either very, very brave or had a "death wish." Taking the pictures in this book was a very dangerous undertaking. The major players in the pictures included drug dealers, thugs, prostitutes and other unsavory characters of the shadowy Paris underbelly. Brassai was lucky not to have been robbed of more than his money and film holders during his continuing documentation of the Paris underworld. Simply being out in some of the dangerous streets where he set up his camera and tripod was taking his life in his hands. Obviously, photographing known criminals in their element made him and his valuable camera equipment a really tempting target for a mugging. Since the local criminals also hated "stool pigeons" or police informers, he was a convenient target of their fear of betrayal. Having a crime magazine editor add a caption to one of his gangster portraits that said "This murderer who..." brought that murderer crashing through Brassai's bedroom door in the middle of the night mad as Hell and brandishing his switchblade and yelling "So I'm a murder, am I...Then I'm going to kill you!" Fortunately, he settled for just robbing him of all his money.
This was the 1930's and Brassai was taking a bulky camera, tripod and the necessary flash equipment into Opium Dens for the wealthy and famous, illegal gambling dens, brothels, houses of illusion, the hidden club world of gay men and women, and dangerous bars where the crooks, pimps and thugs relaxed and conducted business or took revenge on (rubbed out) their competitors. There was no way he could hide the fact he was taking pictures--especially when his flash lit up the entire scene. He was a brave photographer who risked his life to show the insides of the officially unacknowledged flesh-peddling world of Paris life.
Even though the pictures in the book are all from the 1930's and sometimes have a dated and quaint look to them, something else becomes obvious to every viewer and reader of the pictures. It's obvious that nothing much has really changed since those legendary times in Paris. Even Brassai points out that the things he photographed had been going on in the same areas of Paris for centuries. They still do as any tourist to Paris can confirm. The more things change, the more things stay the same. Brassai's world still exists relatively unchanged and not just in Paris, but in almost every major city in the world. That fact makes this a timeless book and that's really something worth knowing.