Book Review: Brassai in America

Brassai's first bite

It wasn't until 1957 that Brassai finally made it to America through a commission from Holiday Magazine. Odd really, because since the early thirties he was in contact with MoMA's Edward Steichen and a New York photo agency sold his work to advertisers, Chicago's Coronet Magazine bought more than two hundred of his photos and in 1937 he took commissions from Harper's Bazaar and started a lifelong friendship with the editor Carmel Snow.

Brassai is probably best known for his photos of Paris night life. Beautiful and sensuous posed shots of night workers and the underclass lit by street light. The Weegee of Paris without the crime or grime. The photos in 'Paris by night' (1933) and 'Camera in Paris' (1949) are rightly considered photographic masterpieces. I was expecting to see something like this in these pages but unfortunately not. The 150 mono and color work are a real mixed bag but my overall impression is of a photographer exploring a completely different new world far from the night shadows of Paris that he was so familiar with.

The photos of New York show life on the street. The gangs, Fifth Avenue pedestrians, Central Park, ruined tenements, Coney Island, Grand Central Terminal and the inevitable skyscrapers. Some of these photos are quite stunning but there are plenty that have ordinary compositions and framing. The section on New Orleans and Louisiana are perhaps even more plain. Night clubs, shopping, a Lake Pontchartrain fairground and several of the locals watching the Mississippi boat scene.

The book's production is adequate, 175 screen duotones on a pleasant matt art. I thought it was unnecessary to present the photos in various formats, some are centered on the page, others bleed of the edge and page 134 even has two images butted together. As the photos vary in size I think it would have been far better just to center them on each page with a reasonable margin.

Brassai took all these photos during a few weeks in 1957 and the twenty-seven page illustrated essay in the front of the book mentions that he was trying out various color stock and using a Leica for the first time. The book's images reflect this point-of-view.

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