Paris
Édition Arts et Métiers Graphiques
First edition
64 p.
spiral bound photopictorial stiff wrappers
gravure ill.
Buch
Text fr. - Other edition: Parallel fr.-engl. ed. [1932]. New edition: München: Schirmer/Mosel 1979. Reprint Paris 1987. - Selected by Andrew Roth to be included in The book of 101 books. New York 2001. - "Published in 1933 by Charles Peignot's Arts et Métiers Graphiques, which also produced the influential graphic arts magazine of the same name and the smart ‘Photographie' annuals, ‘Paris de nuit' combines the luxe and louche. The book, like many of Peignot's publications, is spiral-bound and the size of a child's school composition book, but its graphic design is sophisticated and its photogravure reproductions so rich that the sooty blacks still look like they'll rub off the page. Paul Morand, novelist, diplomat, and, later, persona non grata for his collaboration with the Vichy government, gets the cover's most prominent credit for his essay here, but Brassaï's 64 photos are the book's real meat. Working at night, sometimes in the company of Raymond Queneau or Henry Miller (who gave the photographer a cameo role in his ‘Tropic of Cancer') but often alone, Brassaï became a master at drawing luminosity from the darkness. The swaths of wet paving stones featured on the covers and endpapers of ‘Paris de nuit' gleam like pale beacons in the streetlight. Inside, Brassaï explores the city, beginning with its broad vistas and grand public spaces and gradually moving into the demimonde he knew so intimately. The prostitutes, the rag pickers, the showgirls, the homeless - Brassaï juxtaposed them with pictures of Paris's leisure class, with the Eiffel Tower strung with lights, and the Place de la Concorde ablaze" (Vince Aletti, in Roth). "Amongst the best produced and [most] influential photobooks ever. It demonstrates that the urban flâneur was a crucial figure in 1930s photography, perhaps as important as the social reformer. The book took a definitive step into new territories, which would be colonized by the likes of Weegee, Bill Brandt and others, and not least by Brassaï himself, when his ‘secret' night work from Paris would eventually be widely published" (Parr/Badger I)