…pseudonym of Gyula Halász (1899 – 1984, Romanian/French) was a street artist, photographer, sculptor, writer, and filmmaker.
Street Art/Graffiti
“Many viewers of Brassaï’s work found it easier to accept his photographs of graffiti as art than to accept the graffiti itself. In this sense, his work encouraged audiences to look at graffiti on the street in a new light: as framing devices for the world, as a parallel voice of the city, and as a modern primitive art that is all around us if we just care to look…”
– Street Art, Cedar Lewisohn
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I found a series by him called “Transmutations” that I love, love, love. These days you can probably render a similar/the same kind of effect with Photoshop or Illustrator or AfterEffects, but they didn’t have that back then so they were using photographic glass plates. Very manual, analog type way of doing things. Most avant-garde artists these days still do the analog thing and combine it with digital stuff to enhance their works.
“In 1934, directly inspired by his collaboration with Pablo Picasso who he had been working with for two years, Brassaï decided to experiment with the technique of engraving onto glass photographic plates. He worked on thirty or so negatives of female nudes dated from 1931 to 1935, printing around 150 proofs covering the various states of the photographs at different moments in the process of altering the original material.” – museoreinasofia.es
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Check out Brassai’s Wikipedia entry here
Gelene 