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Brassaï developed his photographic career in Paris from the 1920s until his death, prompting Henry Miller to describe him as “the eye of Paris”. Although his work was adopted by André Breton for its Surrealist qualities, Brassaï felt that “the surrealism of my images was little more than the real made fantastical by sight. I solely looked to express reality, because nothing is more surreal”. He realised his Graffiti series from 1933 to 1960, the foundations of which were based on the photographic recording of the sgraffito drawings he discovered wandering around the streets of Paris. Brassaï approached these anonymous works from popular culture and born out of spontaneous gesture as objets trouvés, endowing them with both symbolism and monumentality. The titles he gave to different groups of photographs evoke mythology and ancestry: The Birth of Man, Love, Death, Magic and Primitive Images. The first photographs from the series appeared in the Surrealist magazine Minotaure in 1933, and for the Surrealists the images resonated as much for the primitivism of the technique and the aesthetics between the grotesque and the formless that they documented, as the role of fate in the photographer’s street encounters with mural interventions.

Concha Calvo Salanova