The Paris that woke after midnight – Brassaï’s 10 photographs that reveal the hidden world of the 1930s

– When Paris turned off the lights of the day, another city came to life.

It was the Paris of small cafés, dark alleys, bars, dance halls, lovers, artists, street characters and those who lived on the margins of society. A lesser-known, more intimate and bolder Paris, which the photographer Brassaï followed night after night in the 1930s.

BBC Culture brings back into attention 10 of his most powerful photographs, images that today are seen as testimony of a world that no longer exists.

Brassaï, the artistic name of Gyula Halász, was born in 1899 in Brassó, in Transylvania, then part of Hungary. He arrived in Paris in 1924 and was very soon drawn to the nightlife of the French capital.

He did not seek only the romantic Paris of postcards. He went where the city became most invisible: in the poor neighborhoods, the clubs, the bars, the brothels and the halls where communities gathered that rarely appeared in the photographs of the time.

Precisely this made his photography special. Brassaï did not look at these people with moral judgment, nor simply as spectacle. He sought to capture the atmosphere, the solitude, the desire, the friendship and the brief moments that happened after the city fell into darkness.

“The Paris that dreams is Brassaï’s Paris,” says Anna Tellgren, curator of the exhibition “Brassaï: The Secret Signs of Paris” at Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

A city built from light and shadows

One of the best-known images is the illuminated Eiffel Tower, photographed in 1931. At a time when night photography required long exposures and heavy equipment, Brassaï experimented with light and shadows to create an almost magical Paris.

Even the steps of Montmartre, photographed around 1937, are not simply an urban view. In their darkness, the city seems to descend towards another world.

According to Philippe Ribeyrolles, the photographer’s nephew, for Brassaï the night was like a photographic developing process: it simplified forms, sculpted the light and turned urban spaces into a “theatre of performances.”

Love in a small café

Among the most famous photographs is that of a couple in love in a small café in the Italie quarter, around 1932.

The two young people look at each other, while their faces are reflected in the mirrors behind them. An ordinary moment, but turned by Brassaï into one of the best-known images of Paris at night.

The photograph was staged, but the photographer had earlier created a relationship of trust with the people he photographed. Often he showed them his photographs and gave the subjects copies of the images.

The Paris that did not appear on postcards

In other photographs appear Fat Claude and her girlfriend at the venue Le Monocle, one of the well-known spaces of the lesbian life of Paris of that time; “Bijou” at the Bar de la Lune, a character of the Montmartre world; and intimate scenes in a brothel in Rue Quincampoix.

Brassaï also photographs the gang of Grand Albert, entering the territory of the criminal world and seeking the trust of the characters he wanted to portray.

In another photograph appears Kiki de Montparnasse, one of the famous figures of the Parisian artistic avant-garde, together with her friends. Kiki was a painter, singer and cabaret artist, as well as one of the icons of Paris’s artistic life.

Freedom in the dance hall

A chapter of their own are the photographs of the Magic-City Dance Hall, where balls were held during the carnivals.

There men could dress as women, in a temporary reversal of social and gender roles. To enter this world, Brassaï was introduced through a well-known figure of the community and used the password “Friend.”

But this freedom would not last. In 1934, one of these balls was banned after pressure from far-right groups.

A Paris that no longer exists

Brassaï published some of his photographs in the book “Paris de Nuit” – “Paris at Night,” in 1933, immediately winning fame.

The most intimate photographs, however, faced post-war censorship and would be published many years later, in 1976, in the book “Le Paris Secret des Années 30” – “The Secret Paris of the 1930s.” Both works today offer a window onto a lost world.

And perhaps this is the reason why Brassaï’s photographs continue to seem so alive.

He was not necessarily trying to preserve an era. He was fascinated by the people who passed by him, by the brief moments and by the atmospheres that changed from one night to the next.

But without knowing it, he preserved precisely what time would erase: a Paris that lived in the shadows and that today exists only in photographs.