Swimmer

Upon moving to Paris in 1924, and drawing inspiration from fellow Hungarian photographer and emigrant André Kertész, Brassaï took to the streets of the city in search of authenticity. He possessed an “infatuation with outcasts,” as he phrased it, and documented the characters of the city’s evening underworld, including prostitutes, transvestites, and mobsters; he published a selection of these images as the book Paris de Nuit (Paris by Night) in 1933. Brassaï also made pictures in the light of day. He might have taken this photograph while vacationing in the coastal French town, Loctudy, near Brittany. In a letter to his parents dated September 18, 1931, he mentions spending time there with a young woman named Jeannine. Though the exact subject of this work is unknown, it is possibly her contorted body, awkwardly mimicking the movement of a swimmer, that Brassaï emphasized and rendered as a sculptural figure in this photograph.