Brassai: Paris by Night

Amazing book of vintage pics of Paris! John Galliano has spoken about using Brassai as inspiration. Good to add to any fashion or photography library! At the time, Brassai was pretty revolutionary in his subjects. Great for snapshots into this period in history.

A surreal nightmare is what we see. When the City of Light becomes the City of Dark, only the most intrepid flaneur need apply. The cumulative effect is a demonstration of injustice and conspicuous excess.

I've seen many of the Brassai images before, however they were much clearer...much sharper. The images in this book are sort of muddled. You can't really make out any detail. I think if Brassai saw how his work is being presented he'd been extremely disappointed. Save your money and get a different version that uses a different printing process.

love his work actually bought this copy to frame the matted pictures, am looking forward to visiting some of his favorite haunts in Paris

Book arrived safely, packed very well, looked new. Also the mailinformation about the coming book was good and informative.Would certainly order again a next time.

terrible quality images

Beautiful!!

Those here who dismiss the image quality of this book are right, though I wonder if some of the limitation's of Brassai's time also color their disappointment. Brassai's night images will never be as sharp or detailed as modern night photography. But at their best his images are wonderfully atmospheric and rich. And how well that comes off depends on the printing qualities shown on each page. This Bullfinch release is very disappointing compared to the Pantheon's 1987 edition which presents almost the exact same layout and content.A note in this book states that the images are printed in heliogravure. The exact same language is shown in the 1987 Pantheon edition. We might expect that the images would look the same, but they don't. All Bullfinch's images have been screened, which makes them look blotchy, lowers contrast, and loses detail. The screens are very fine, so you won't see it without a loop or high-quality scan. But enlarging these images helps explain why the images look flat. Pantheon's book is quite beautiful, and well worth acquiring in any condition.I have both of the books I mention here. Actually two of the Pantheon- one is a the cheapest copy I could find on Amazon so I could cut it up and scan it on an Epson V750. I don't mind ripping up my Bullfinch book at all.An especially odd thing about the Bullfinch release is that every single image in the book has been cropped in slightly compared to Pantheon, and then enlarged so that it covers the same space on the page. If I were a betting man, I'd guess the talk of using Brassai's plates is false- these look like scans from a previous printing.The two images below show scans from Pantheon and Bullfinch from plate 4, "Tuileries Gardens". They were scanned seconds after one another and identically processed. Amazon seems to want to show them at reduced size, but in Chrome, if you click once on the image and then right-click on the bigger image and choose "Open image in new tab" you will see a large image that shows 600 ppi crops from two locations on this plate. The right section shows the bottoom edge of the image area and the amount the Bullfinch crops each image.I'm not sure that this review does a good job advocating for the positive qualities of the Pantheon release. Just because the printing process is different, are the pictures that much better? Yes, this is one of my favorite photo books. I couldn't imagine this material being presented in much better form than what we see in the Pantheon book.