Paris Nocturne

Paris Nocturne is the most complete account yet of the night pictures that made Brassaï's name, treating the 1930s work as a single body rather than two famous books.

The volume brings together the photographs of Paris de nuit (1932) and The Secret Paris of the 30s with unpublished negatives, contact sheets, scrapbook clippings, mock-ups and magazine spreads from the archive, reproduced in 214 duotone plates among 296 illustrations. Three essays by Sylvie Aubenas of the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Quentin Bajac, then of the Centre Pompidou, place the pictures within Brassaï's early career, his friendships with Henry Miller and the Surrealists, and the commercial press that first carried them. First published in French by Gallimard in 2012, this is the Thames & Hudson edition of 2013.

Brassaï (Gyula Halász, 1899–1984) came to Paris from Transylvania in 1924 and took up the camera to record what he saw on his nocturnal walks: brothels, bals musette, fog on the quais, the workers and lovers of the small hours. Those pictures became the model for a whole tradition of urban night photography, and this book is the reference edition of them.