Favorite Photo Reviews 5: Henry Miller's "The Eye of Paris"

Brassai, Chair in the Tuileries (1932)

This is the sixth post in my “Favorite Photo Reviews” series. Today’s pick is Henry Miller’s “The Eye of Paris” (included in his 1940 essay collection The Wisdom of the Heart), an intense, powerful, rhapsodic celebration of the work of Hungarian-born photographer Brassai (Gyula Halész). Miller calls Brassai “an eye, a living eye.” He praises his “normal vision.” He says,

Brassai has that rare gift which so many artists despise - normal vision. He has no need to distort or deform, no need to lie or to preach. He would not alter the living arrangement of the world by one iota; he sees the world precisely as it is and as few men in the world see it because seldom do we encounter a human being endowed with normal vision. Everything to which his eye attaches itself acquires value and significance, a value and significance, I might say, heretofore avoided or ignored. The fragment, the defect, the commonplace - he detects in them what there is of novelty or perfection. He explores with equal patience, equal interest, a crack in the wall or the panorama of a city. Seeing becomes an end in itself. For Brassai is an eye, a living eye.

How I love that “he sees the world precisely as it is.” In other words, Brassai sees the world not as symbol or metaphor, but as “the thing itself” (Edward Weston’s great phrase). He says it again later in his piece, referring to Brassai’s “desire not to tamper with the object but regard it as it is.”

He admires Brassai’s ability to give the ordinary its beautiful due: “What is most familiar to the eye, what has become stale and commonplace, acquires through the flick of his magic lens the properties of the unique.”

My favourite part of Miller’s essay is his description of Brassai’s wonderful Chair in the Tuileries (1932). Are you ready for it? Fasten your seatbelt:

I think of chair because among all the objects which Brassai has photographed his chair with the wire legs stands out with a majesty that is singular and disquieting. It is a chair of the lowest denomination, a chair which has been sat on by beggars and by royalty, by little trot-about-whores and by queenly opera divas. It is a chair which the municipality rents daily to any and every one who wishes to pay fifty centimes for sitting down in the open air. A chair with little holes in the seat and wire legs which come to a loop at the bottom. The most unostentatious, the most inexpensive, the most ridiculous chair, if a chair can be ridiculous, which could be devised. Brassai chose precisely this insignificant chair and, snapping it where he found it, unearthed what there was in it of dignity and veracity. THIS IS A CHAIR. Nothing more. No sentimentalism about the lovely backsides which once graced it, no romanticism about the lunatics who fabricated it, no statistics about the hours of sweat and anguish that went into the creation of it, no sarcasm about the era which produced it, no odious comparisons with chairs of other days, no humbug about the dreams of the idlers who monopolize it, no scorn for the nakedness of it, no gratitude either. Walking along a path of the Jardin des Tuileries one day he saw this chair standing on the edge of a grating. He saw at once chair, grating, tree, clouds, sun, people. He saw that the chair was as much a part of that fine spring day as the tree, the clouds, the sun, the people. He took it as it was, with its honest little holes, its slender wire legs. Perhaps the Prince of Wales once sat on it, perhaps a holy man, perhaps a leper, perhaps a murderer or an idiot. Who sat on it did not interest Brassai in the least. It was a spring day and the foliage was greening; the earth was in a ferment, the roots convulsed with sap. On such a day, if one is alive, one can well believe that out of the dead body of the earth there will spring forth a race of men immortal in their splendor. On such a day there is visible in the stalest object a promise, a hope, a possibility. Nothing is dead, except in the imagination. Animate or inanimate, all bodies under the sun give expression to their vitality. Especially on a fine day in spring!

And so on that day, in that glorious hour, the homely, inexpensive chair belonging to the municipality of Paris became the empty throne which is always beseeching the restless spirit of man to end his fear and longing and proclaim the kingdom of man.

Perhaps Miller gets a little carried away towards the end there. Nevertheless, I love it - a soaring aria in tribute to a great photograph.