Brassai - Letters to My Parents

Nicknamed the "Eye of Paris" by Henry Miller, Brassai was one of the great European photographers of the 20th century.

This volume of letters and photographs, many published for the first time, chronicles the early years of Brassai's life and artistic development in Paris and Berlin during the 1920s and 1930s.

Born Gyula Halasz in 1899 in Hungary, Brassai moved to Berlin in 1920 and quickly became part of its intense intellectual life.

Among his friends were Moholy-Nagy, Kandinsky, and Kokoschka.

In 1924 he moved to France, where he was at the centre of the extraordinary art scene in Paris between the two world wars.

Brassai shot a series of photographs while wandering the city at night with Henry Miller and other nocturnal walkers such as Leon-Paul Fargue and Raymond Quenea.

The series was published as a book, "Paris de nuit", and won Brassai an Emerson gold medal, while Miller wrote his first of many pieces about the photographer.

Oddly, Brassai is one of the least understood of the major 20th-century photographers, possibly because so little is known of his early life and friendships. He was close to many major artists of the modernist era including Picasso, Andre Breton, Man Ray, and Pierre Reverdy and was recognized as an artist of equal standing in his field.

Throughout the thirties and forties Brassai's photographs appeared in an array of magazines; at "Harper's Bazaar" he worked closely with editor-in-chief Carmel Snow and her art director Alexey Brodovitch for nearly 25 years.

The letters Brassai wrote to his parents during his years as a student and struggling artist in Paris and Berlin are published here in English.

Just as Brassai captured in his photographs the texture, mood, and mystery of 1930s Paris, so too in his letters, through his detailed descriptions, he conveys what it was like to live in that world.

A work for everyone interested in Brassai and the history of photography, this collection should interest anyone who wants a first-hand account of Berlin and Paris in the 1920s and 1930s.