I captured this abstract figure of a woman the other day when Charlotte, Elle, and I had lunch at Moderna Museet in Stockholm. It was the second time in two weeks that I was there. The previous visit was with Erica, a friend from New York, and her buddy Erik from Stockholm.

Both times we first took a look at the retrospective of Brassaï – The Secret Signs of Paris, which focuses on his iconic black-and-white photography of the streets, inhabitants, and nightlife of Paris during the early 1930s. Brassaï was born Gyula Halász in Transylvania (now Romania) in 1899 and found his creative home in Paris during the 1920s.

He actually started as a journalist, but that changed when he picked up a camera and began documenting his long nightly walks through Paris.

What makes his work so inspiring is that Brassaï never tried to make the city look like a postcard. He photographed high society, prostitutes, brothels, dive bars, wet cobblestones, fog, factories, and the corners of life most photographers ignore.

And it’s exactly this that makes his work feel so relatable to me. I can see something beautiful in almost every place and in every person I meet.

Brassaï was also not interested in photography as some rigid academic or technical exercise. His drive was chronic curiosity, and he seemed willing to point his camera at almost anything that caught his eye and captured geometry in streets, walls, staircases, and shadows. He even photographed Parisian graffiti decades before anyone seriously thought of calling it art.

Technically, he made brilliant use of whatever light was available. Streetlamps, headlights, reflections, thick fog, and darkness became part of the composition rather than obstacles to overcome.

Author Henry Miller famously called Brassaï “The Eye of Paris,” and the name fits perfectly. He moved freely between the elegant and the sordid, the beautiful and the broken, making photographs that were less about individual subjects than about the atmosphere and soul of Paris.