A striking heliogravure by Brassaï, 1936, capturing two trapeze performers suspended high above a packed circus arena, caught in the glare of the spotlights against the darkness of the big top. The composition is classic Brassaï — a master of night photography and dramatic contrasts of light and shadow, best known for his iconic nocturnal scenes of 1930s Paris later collected in "Paris de Nuit." Here he turns his eye to the spectacle of the circus, a subject he returned to throughout the decade, isolating the performers as small, luminous figures against the vast dark tent and the anonymous mass of the audience below.

Brassaï, born Gyula Halász in 1899 in Brassó, Transylvania (then part of Hungary, now Romania), was one of the defining photographers of the 20th century. He trained as a painter and sculptor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest and in Berlin before settling in Paris in 1924, where he moved among the artists and writers of Montparnasse — Picasso, Miró, Dalí, and Henry Miller among them. Encouraged by fellow Hungarian André Kertész to take up a camera, Brassaï began photographing the city after dark, documenting its streets, cafés, and demimonde with a grainy, atmospheric intimacy. His landmark 1933 book Paris de Nuit (Paris by Night) earned him the nickname "the eye of Paris," courtesy of Henry Miller. Beyond the nocturnal Paris for which he is best known, Brassaï also turned his lens on the city's high society, ballet, opera, and the circus — a recurring subject throughout the 1930s. He joined the Rapho photographic agency in 1935, and in 1948 was given a solo exhibition at MoMA in New York. His photographs are held today in the permanent collections of MoMA, SFMOMA, LACMA, and the Centre Pompidou, among other major institutions.