Getty Museum
The Sun King, City Gate at Saint-Ouen, Paris
Creator
BrassaïPhotographer · 1899–1984
All works by this person →After moving to Paris in 1924, Gyula Halász renamed himself Brassaï, after his hometown of Brasso, Hungary. In Paris he worked as a journalist and painter until around 1929, when he took up photography on the advice of fellow Hungarian André Kertész. A natural storyteller, Brassaï revealed his unscientific yet practical method of making exposures of Paris at night: *To gauge my shutter time, I wou
More on Getty ULAN- Date
- 1945–1950
- Medium
- Gelatin silver print
- Culture
- Hungarian
- Department
- Photographs
- Institution
- Getty Museum
- Object ID
- d2760409-3e47-4774-98ad-44f89d2c0ba8
From the Getty Museum record
In 1968 Brassaï said, "Walls attract me because, in our civilization, they replace nature." In this monumental close-up of a modern graffito, his passion for drawing and his delight in the graphic qualities of vigorous, frenetic incised lines are evident. Through his careful choice of lighting and framing, Brassaï made an inspired photographic record of the work of an anonymous artist. In 1961, thirty years after he began photographing the subject, Brassaï published *Graffiti*, a book that evoked some of his most poetic musings on his diverse intellectual interests, including art history, ethnography, paleontology, psychology, and social history.
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