City of Nights

Arriving in Paris in 1924, Hungarian-born Gyula Halász was anything but a photographer. A painter and occasional journalist, he even confessed to despising the art form. But he was a night owl, attracted to a city couched in the glow of street lamps and dense mist. Nocturnal Paris was, to him, a "world of pleasure, of love, vice, crime, drugs ... Paris at its most alive." The work of Brassaï, as Halász became in 1932 (meaning "from Brassó," his native village), made him one of the most admired and enduring photographers of the last century. And when 750 of the artist's...