'When nothing was taboo': 10 intimate images of a lost, decadent 1930s Paris

Moving "effortlessly from slums to exclusive salons", the legendary photographer Brassaï captured the brothels, gay bars and backstreets of Paris's hazy night-time in its radical inter-war years.

Brassaï's photographs of lovers in cafes, the gargoyles of Notre Dame and the lamplit streets of Montmartre are some of the most iconic ever produced of Paris. A pioneer of night-time photography, he has shaped the view of the city as a place for romance, forever caught in a hazy twilight world of shadow. "The Paris you dream of, that's Brassaï's Paris," Anna Tellgren, curator of Brassaï: The Secret Signs of Paris at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, tells the BBC.  

But there is far more to his oeuvre than the select group of images reproduced on postcards.

Born Gyula Halász in 1899 in Brassó, Transylvania, then part of Hungary, Brassaï began studying art in Budapest in 1918 and continued his studies in Berlin. He arrived in the French capital in 1924, where he embraced the secret nightlife of the city during the interwar years, an era when nothing was taboo. Finding himself instinctively drawn to the city's outcasts, he ventured into balls for homosexuals, gay bars and brothels, portraying their inner worlds with no sense of voyeurism or moral judgement. "He was one of the first who went in there and documented these milieux. It's very early documentation of queer life," says Tellgren.

Brassaï published a selection of his work in Paris de Nuit (Paris by Night) in 1933, which brought him instant fame. Shortly after World War Two, however, restrictive censorship  prevented him from publishing his more intimate photographs. He would have to wait until 1976 to publish Le Paris Secret des Années 30 (The Secret Paris of the 1930s). The two books combined offer a fascinating window into a world lost forever. Here we look at 10 of his most evocative images of the city.

1. The Eiffel Tower illuminated (La Tour Eiffel éclairée (1931))

This stunning image of the Eiffel Tower showcases Brassaï's skill in nocturnal photography, which in the 1930s involved much trial and error on the ground and ingenuity in the darkroom. As Philippe Ribeyrolles, Brassaï's nephew tells the BBC over email, the production of such images "involved glass plates in a Voigtländer Bergheil camera on a tripod, which allowed for long exposures, different brands of cigarettes as light meters, and a knotted string as a rangefinder. Above all, it required extensive darkroom work, which, through a skilful interplay of contrasts and half tones under a safelight, enhanced his keen sense of composition."

2. Steps of Montmartre (Escalier de la Butte Montmartre (c 1937))

Brassaï's images, whether of Montmartre's vertiginous tree-lined steps descending into a shadowy world below or the multiple characters that made the night their own, were never simply snapshots of a particular scene. They "do not seek to document an environment, but to extract a latent truth from it," says Ribeyrolles. "The night acts like the developer in the photographer's darkroom: it simplifies forms, sculpts light, isolates bodies, and transforms urban space into a theatre of apparitions. What Brassaï captures are states of being, whether of solitude, desire, or aimless........

© BBC