pstrongBrassai was the first great chronicler of the urban underbellystrongppThis sumptuous Brassai overview gathers outstanding prints of his finest and most popular photographs, drawing on the Estate Brassai in Paris and the collections of leading museums in France and the United States. The work is organized into 18 thematic groupings, such as Paris by Night, Portraits and Self-Portraits, Body of a Woman, Graffiti, Places and Things, Pleasures and The Street, focusing throughout on his celebrated depictions of 1930s Paris.ppWhen Brassai took up photography in the late 1920s, after his move to Paris in 1924 from his native Brassov in Austria-Hungary, via Budapest and Berlin, the photobook was blossoming as a new art form ripe for exploration. Brassai gave the genre one of its undisputed classics, iParis de nuiti 1933--the first in what is now a long line of photobooks portraying cities by night. The book was popular with both cognoscenti and tourists, and made Brassai famous he becam