The increasing use of street lighting throughout the second half of the 19th century made it possible to capture nighttime scenes on photosensitive film despite the long exposure times of the equipment of the period.
With the progress of high-speed films, the higher sensitivity digital image sensors, wide aperture lenses and high availability of urban light, night photography is increasingly more and more true to its colours.
Credits to following text: Copyright Taka Kawachi / SEIN quarterly magazine by the SIGMA group 23. October 2019:
Working as a journalist in Paris, Brassaï learned the mechanics of the camera and the basic rules of photography from André Kertész, a fellow Hungarian who had moved to Paris a while before him and could illustrate his articles with his own photographs.
What Brassaï truly wanted to capture, however, was the fascinating world that unfolded in the cafes of Paris night after night. He adopted a fake name (Brassaï is a pseudonym), likely to protect himself and his reputation, and photographed Paris’ hidden underbelly of prostitutes, pimps and transvestites.
It is easy to imagine the technical difficulties that Brassaï had to face when photographing in the darkness of Paris’ cabarets and alleys at night. He took his pictures with small plate camera mounted on a tripod, and fired a magnesium flash to light his scenes. Brassaï’s photography is the result of many brilliant techniques and hidden tricks, one of which—called the “set-up”—had Brassaï decide the photograph in advance, then carefully prepare the location and his gear before instructing his subjects to take poses that would look natural in the final images.
He published these photographs in 1932 in his first photo book called Paris de Nuit (Paris by Night), its cover adorned by a moody photograph of a rain-wet cobblestone street glistening in the night. The people in his photographs, captured with artificial light on street corners and in cafes, possess an almost shocking sense of presence. In spite of the difficult conditions he was facing, Brassaï managed to create photographs that immediately fascinate us with their subjects and locations — a feature he achieved not only thanks to his technical prowess but also his personal charm that helped lower the guard of his models.
It is no surprise to me that Brassaï, who pioneered numerous techniques and methods to capture his natural-looking photographs, has become the subject of favorable critical attention again.
The first still photographers though to have produced large bodies of work at night, were Brassaï and Brandt, who delivered images of cities, therefore of anthropized areas. This is what Brassaï did with Paris' artificially illuminated streets (Paris de Nuit, 1936, is one example) or Bill Brandt did with London's only moonlight illuminated streets during a black out during World War II: St. Paul's cathedral, 1942. Bill Brandt wrote about his encounter with the night and night photography in his early book Camera in London (Publisher: The Focal Press, London, 1948). Pages extracts, courtesy of John-Paul Kernot, Bill Brandt Archive 4 Airlie Gardens London.
Brandt explains and contextualizes his fascination for the night and why it mattered in that specific period.
Credits to following text: online exhibition catalogue by Victoria and Albert Museum for Bill Brandt: setting the scene.
I photographed pubs, common lodging houses at night, theatres, Turkish baths, prisons and people in their bedrooms. London has changed so much that some of these pictures now have a period charm almost of another century. (Bill Brandt)
Brandt's second photobook, A Night in London, was published in London and Paris in 1938. It was based on Brassaï's Paris de Nuit (1936). The book tells the story of a London night, moving between different social classes and made use of Brandt's family and friends.
Night photography was a new genre, opened up by the newly developed flashbulb (the Vacublitz was manufactured in Britain from 1930), although Brandt generally preferred to use portable tungsten lamps called photo-floods. Brandt also often used the darkroom to alter his photographs in decisive ways, using the day for night technique employed by cinematographers to transform images photographed in daylight into night scenes.
In 1939, at the beginning of the war, I was back in London photographing the blackout. The darkened town, lit only by moonlight, looked more beautiful than before or since. It was fascinating to walk through the deserted streets and to photograph houses which I knew well, and which no longer looked three-dimensional, but flat like painted stage scenery. (Bill Brandt)
Bill Brandt met Tom Hopkinson, then assistant editor of Weekly Illustrated, in 1936. Hopkinson, later knighted for services to journalism, became Brandt's editor at Lilliputand Picture Post magazines. Brandt would propose picture-stories for both magazines and often sequence his own photo-essays, sometimes also contributing text.
The blackout photographs were probably Brandt's own idea, and were made during the phoney war period in 1939, after war had been declared but before serious hostilities between Britain and Germany had begun. A second set of blackout photographs were made in 1942.
In Brandt’s inky photographs, the sky can be a tar pit. Lovers in an illicit room can take on the gray scale and density of anthracite. Darkness has more than an aesthetic appeal for Brandt. For him, its charms are metaphysical. It stabilizes a haphazard world and pays due respect to its mysteries.
It was during the wartime blitz that Brandt found his darkest materials. London’s blackouts offered him darkness as the ordinary condition of the world. (Time Magazine)
Credit: Princeton University Art Museum / Art Resource, NY
Artist: Copyright Bill Brandt (1904-1983)
Description: St. Paul's Ruins in Moonlight (Blackout in London). Gelatin silver print with ferrotyping; 20.7 × 16.1 cm. Lent anonymously (L.1990.151.44).
Location: Princeton University Art Museum / Princeton / New Jersey / USA (License valid for 10 years only)
