Brassaï (Gyula Halász)
[Photographer, b. 1889, Brassó, Transylvania, Hungary (now Romania), d. 1984, Eze, Alpes-Maritimes, France.]
In photography you can never express yourself directly, only through optics, the physical and chemical process. It is this sort of submission to the object and abnegation of self that is exactly what pleases me about photography.
During my first years in Paris, beginning in 1924, I lived at night, going to bed at sunrise, getting up at sunset, wandering about the city from Montparnasse to Montmartre. And even though I had always ignored and even disliked photography before, I was inspired to become a photographer by my desire to translate all the things that enchanted me in the nocturnal Paris I was experiencing.
A negative doesn’t mean anything for a photographer of my type. It’s the printing by its creator alone that matters.
(On his stipulation that none of his photographs be printed posthumously)
... drawn by the beauty of evil, the magic of the lower depths, having taken pictures for my “voyage to the end of the night” from the outside, I wanted to know what went on inside: behind the walls, behind the facades, in the wings: bars, dives, night clubs, one-night hotels, bordellos, opium dens. I was eager to penetrate this other world, this fringe world, the secret, sinister world of mobsters, outcasts, toughs, pimps, whores, addicts, inverts.
Now that a perfect whole is slowly emerging from I develop day after day (light and shadow, front stairs and back stairs, the 500-franc banquet and the cesspit), I have to admit that I must truly be what an American writer, Henry Miller, called me: “the eye of Paris.” You see, even if it took a lot of struggle, I have wrested from fate the opportunity to give my talent free reign after all, although success and popularity come at a price: a permanent address, responsibility, social status, are precisely the bugaboos I have abhorred all my life.
The clear view of objects has opened my eyes, and today I can see into the heart of matters. How can I catch royal game with this dragnet that is photography?
One begins to understand that painting is not our means of expression. It is a medium that comes from the past. Now there are new means of expression. There is television. There is the cinema, film. And one begins to understand that it is the photographic image which is the means to expression of our century.
In the light of photography a new Proust has been revealed to me as a sort of mental photographer who used his own body as an ultrasensitive plate, managing thereby to capture and register in his youth thousands of impressions, and who, starting from the search for lost time, dedicated his own time to developing and printing them, thereby making visible the latent image of his entire life in that gigantic photograph constituted by À la recherche du temps perdu.
