HOW TO LOOK - STUDIO BRIGHT’S DESIGN FOR BRASSAÏ: SECRET PARIS TURNS LOOKING INTO A PHYSICAL ACT

Brassaï, the Transylvanian-born émigré who made the after-dark city his subject across Paris de Nuit and, decades later, The Secret Paris of the 30s, is the hook. But the exhibition's quieter argument isn't made by the photographs alone, but the rooms that hold them.

The Estate's curator, the artist's nephew, proposes that Brassaï's eye teaches us "not only how to see, but above all how to look." Studio Bright, Mel Bright with Eliza Ng, Maryna Popova and Pei She Lee, took the instruction at its word and built it into architecture. The result refuses the neutral gallery with its static, clinical walls, and makes looking a deliberate, bodily act.

The design gestures employed are characteristically restrained. A spare, warm palette of timber, black and terrazzo underpins a lightweight system of suspended panels, engineered to come apart and be used again once the show closes. "Exhibition design so often chases moments of intensity while ignoring the short life of its materials," Bright says. "We wanted the intensity and a system that could be disassembled and reused beyond the exhibition."

That intensity announces itself at the threshold. Brassaï's Des marches de Montmartre avec un chien blanc (the steps of Montmarte with a white dog) greets the visitor. Fragmented across a run of enlarged hanging panels, the shift in scale, surface marks and textures easily missed in the original print, becomes pronounced and serves to draw one in. Suspended on fine wires and weighted by unevenly stacked cobblestones reminiscent of those in the images, the planes read as slightly off balance, almost anthropomorphic. "They feel as though they've paused mid-stride," Bright says, "and might keep walking at any moment."

Beyond, the first sequence, Paris by Night, opens into an almost entirely black room. Visitors move among the suspended photographs while further works line the walls. Enlarged to the scale of the city itself, the planes carry the stone wall Brassaï spent decades photographing bodily into the gallery; you no longer study the image so much as walk through it. The panels also briefly conceal their neighbours, so each photograph can be met on its own before it is seen in company. "The concealment is deliberate," Bright says. "You encounter a work in isolation, then realise it belongs to a crowd." It is a spatial echo of Brassaï's own dictum that "night does not show things, it suggests them."

Relief arrives through a simple inversion of colour. Low white aperture boxes puncture the black volume, their softly lit interiors holding Brassaï's surrealist images. To see them you must bend or sit; viewing becomes something you perform rather than receive. Set at a lower height, the apertures also quietly widen who the exhibition is for, meeting wheelchair users and children at eye level while asking everyone else to fold their bodies toward the work. "Accessibility became something embodied," Bright says. "The height slows people down, and it lets more of them in on the same terms." Rather than presenting the pictures immediately, the apertures decelerate the whole exhibition, favouring encounter over spectacle.

None of this competes with the prints. Studio Bright's restraint, the disciplined palette, a single bespoke bench, the willingness to withhold in quiet hommage to the act of revealing, honours the theatre of the work without narrating it. It is the practice's second exhibition for Heide, after Barbara Hepworth: In Equilibrium in 2022, and it shares that project's confidence in the room as a co-author rather than a backdrop.

Brassaï described his aim as being to "suggest, not insist or explain." Studio Bright has designed to the same brief, as though in conversation with him. The exhibition proposes rather than declares; it asks its visitors to lean in, slow down and look, which, on the evidence of these rooms, is not only the point but the preference.

You can find out more about Brassaï on their website. The Brassaï: Secret Paris runs at Heide Museum of Modern Art until 15 November 2026. Exhibition design by Studio Bright. Installation photography by Astrid Mulder. Words by Tiffany Jade.