Brassaï

The man from Transylvania

Left his native land for good

To study a new city.

There he sought the beauty

Of every day and every night,

Statues, neon signs in fog,

Couples in tight embrace,

In café, metro, passageway;

The gangs in flat caps, smoking,

High and low-lit, together looking

At what prey should pass them by

Under bridges and arcades,

In Paris streets and alleys. He shot

The naked whores at Susy’s,

Shapely, half-seen rumps and hips

Of couched and crouching studio nudes.

Tuberous potatoes caught his eye,

And phallic metro railings,

Illumined by his trademark halo,

All in clair-obscur, as though

His world lived mostly in the dark.

Objects surged from night

Like pebbles moulded on the beach

By the sensual hand of God.

So he shaped stones of phallic birds,

And large-haunched, tiny-headed women,

Sought elements of mythology

In slate-grey walls’ graffiti,

Pitted, like post-war façades,

With letters, skulls and hearts,

But this was nineteen thirty-four,

The stone was splintered well before

The staring eyes and open mouths

Married on the boulevard

With plaques recording sacrifice

And the settlement of a score.

Brassaï carefully improvised

His own dark room,

Trusted no one else to print,

His strange, familiar world,

Items picked up on the streets,

Identified in different lights,

Estranging self from self

Through mirrors and reflections.

Images of sex and death,

The fairground games, the beggars,

Halt and blind, the idiot and whore

Of Goya or Picasso

Hovering always near.

A magnesium flash lit up

A nightmare sixty years and more

Of life composedly observed:

Paris by Night along the quay,

Spots where strangers did not go

He found and made into

His new mythology.

Peering through the lens

Of tripod-mounted Voigtländer,

Wide hat-brim shielding eye,

Fag in mouth like Jean Gabin,

The law of gravity did not apply,

He claimed, and scratched in memory,

As did Picasso on his plate,

The strangeness of reality.

©Terry Hodgson2025