CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 9/9/2020

Celebrating Brassaï, denizen of the "fringe world," born on this day, 1899

"At Magic City" (c. 1932) is reproduced from Fondacion Mapfre's superlative 368-page Brassaï survey, published to accompany a recent show at SFMOMA. "I was eager to penetrate this other world," Brassaï is quoted, "this fringe world, the secret, sinister world of mobsters, outcasts, toughs, pimps, whores, addicts, inverts. Rightly or wrongly, I felt at the time that this underground world represented Paris at its least cosmopolitan, its most alive, its most authentic, that in these colorful faces of its underworld there had been preserved from age to age, almost without alteration, the folklore of its most remote past."