Using the deep black of the heliotype like no other, in Paris la nuit the great photographer Brassaï forever captured the nocturnal world of the capital in the 1930s. A mysterious and at the same time very real City of Light, made up of slums and cabarets, homeless people and aristocrats, but also of bakers, gardeners, guards and newspaper printers... Brassaï considered the two-year period 1932-1933 the most important of his life, since in that period he had met Picasso, published this volume and collaborated with the surrealist magazine Minotaure. But he immediately added, almost as if he wanted to distance himself from the group: «The surrealism of my images is nothing other than reality made fantastic by the gaze. I was only trying to express the real, because nothing is more surreal... My ambition has always been to show an aspect of everyday life as if discovering it for the first time." The hypnotic poetry of Paris la nuit, his first photographic book, faithfully expresses this belief in the inexhaustible resources of everyday life.