Zemni Images

Photography, moving image, design and illustration of Linda Mayoux

Brassai

Category: France

  • Brassai

    The flâneur archetype takes different forms but can easily be identified in the figure of Brassaï (1899–1984) who embodies Rebecca Solnit’s description of the flâneur as “… the image of an observant and solitary man strolling about Paris” (Solnit, 2001, p.198). Brassaï photographed, in both senses, the darker side of Paris. He photographed transvestites and homosexuals at underground bars and clubs, and he photographed the streets of Paris extensively at night, published in the celebrated Paris by Night (1933).

    Brassaï (1899-1984) was a Hungarian-born French photographer who created countless iconic images of 1920s Parisian life.

    He moved to Paris in 1924, working as a journalist and joined a circle of Hungarian artists and writers. His seminal book Paris de Nuit (Paris by Night 1933) documented the nightlife of prostitutes, street cleaners, and other scenes in his neighborhood of Montparnasse.

    He also documented high society, including the ballet, opera, and intellectuals—among them his friends and contemporaries, Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dalí, Alberto Giacometti, and Henri Matisse. He was also interested in graffiti, seeing it as a form of Outsider Art that could open the door for new artistic expression.

    His black and white images are very dark and moody with large areas of clipped black with rim lighting have influenced my work in Assignment 2.1 Bridge.

    Showcases some of his most iconic photos

  • Sophie Ristelhueber

    Sophie Ristelhueber (born 1949) is a French photographer. Her photographs concern the human impact of war, and she has photographed extensively in the Balkans and Middle East. She was born in Paris, where she still lives.

    Tate Shots video with transcript

    I had strongly in mind the idea that I was not going to document this war. Though we have very few images of it, I wanted to do a statement on how little we see…So this work is entitled Fait, which in French means done, and a fact…I was not so much interested in that conflict, which was for me an oil problem, but through an image I’ve seen in a magazine of the trenches, that I imagine like being wounds in the desert… My decision when I arrived in Kuwait was to take an aerial view… a way to talk about the fact that we see everything with satellites, or all the technical data we have now, and in a way, we see nothing.

     

  • Luc Delahaye

    !!To be done

    Luc Delahaye (born France 1962) also describes history painting as a point of reference to his practice, although his process is very different to Wall’s. Delahaye, whose earlier career was in photojournalism, continues to make work around current, ‘newsworthy’ stories across the globe. Throughout his ongoing History series, Delahaye has attended political ceremonies and meetings, as well as recent and current war zones. Instead of using high-end digital equipment
    and hurrying to transmit his images to agencies before his competitors in the field, Delahaye uses large format analogue cameras to make large-scale gallery prints. His approach goes very much against the grain of modern photojournalism. While his images are not typically as sparse of people as the work of ‘late photographers’ working with similar equipment, they all have the
    presence and communicate the gravitas of the scenarios he depicts. Unlike photojournalism, there is no conspicuous attempt to reveal a ‘decisive moment’. Delahaye photographs at a discrete, but not disengaged, distance:
    “As Delahaye points out, his pictures highlight ‘the insignificance of my
    own position.’ They also entail a reversal of the history paintings they
    call upon, where the grandeur, spectacle and glory of war and figures
    of power were celebrated. There is little that is glorious here. Instead, his
    views show up the scale of things, very often putting them in perspective.”
    (Mark Durden ‘Global Documentary’ (2005) in Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2005. London: The Photographers’ Gallery, p.13)