Born Gyula Halász in Brasso, Transylvania, (1899-1984) and using his birthplace as a pseudonym, Brassaï, along with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Jacques-Henri Lartique and Andre Kertesz, is considered one of the most celebrated photographers of the interwar period. During his twenties, Brassaï studied art at the Hungarian Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest (1918) and the Academy of Fine Arts in Berlin-Charlottenburg in 1920, before working as a journalist, where he befriended and photographed famed artists such as Giacometti, Braque, and Picasso.

Known for his highly structured compositions of Parisian nightlife scenes that captured the social disparities of daily life, Brassaï’s first photographic project, Paris by Night, 1933 (Paris de Nuit) featured outdoor nocturnal scenes that relied upon deep shadows and light, disorienting close-ups and chance discoveries. Subsequently reproduced in the Surrealist magazine Minotaure and Andre Breton’s L’amour de fou, these images became the means through which Brassai became associated with the Surrealist movement during the 1930s and an influential figure in avant-garde photography.

The publication Camera in Paris (1949) generated international interest in Brassai after World War II and his reputation grew through a number of solo and group exhibitions- including his first solo exhibition in the United States in 1954 at the Art Institute of Chicago

(which traveled to Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; George Eastman Museum, Rochester; and New Orleans Museum of Art). Subsequently, The Museum of Modern Art included him in their famous exhibition The Family of Man (1955) and organized an internationally-traveling exhibition in 1968. Recent retrospectives have included Brassaï: The Soul of Paris, organized by the Centre Pompidou, Paris (2000) and Brassaï: The Eye of Paris at the Museum of Fine Arts Houston (1998). A major traveling retrospective that was organized by Fundación MAPFRE in Barcelona and Madrid in 2018 is currently on view at the Foam Museum in Amsterdam through December 2019.

Currently, Brassaï’s photography can be found in many prominent museum collections worldwide including the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam; Tate Britain, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid; Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Museum of Modern Art, NY; and The Art Institute of Chicago. Among other prestigious awards, Brassaï received the gold medal at the Photography Biennial in Venice in 1957, the Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres (1974), the Chevlier de l’Ordre de la Legion d’Honneur (1976) and the first Grand Prix National de la Photographie in Paris (1978).