Lydia Lunch, Delancey Street Loft, 1977 © Godlis
In the summer of 1976, two events occurred, forever transforming the course of American photographer Godlis’ life and the history of punk. It began when he purchased a copy of The Secret Paris of the 30s, Brassaï’s evocative memoir from his youth featuring his adventures through the brothels and opium dens of the bas monde.
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“During my first years in Paris, beginning in 1924, I lived at night, going to bed at sunrise, getting up at sunset, wandering about the city from Montparnasse to Montmartre,” Brassaï, then in his seventies, wrote. “I was inspired to become a photographer by my desire to translate all the things that enchanted me in the nocturnal Paris I was experiencing.”
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On one of these nightly jaunts, Brassaï happened upon the Bals-Musette, a shady dance hall where Paris’s high society mingled with its underground. Here, he made pictures too scandalous to include in Paris by Night, the groundbreaking 1933 monograph that brought the Hungarian photographer to the world stage. But by the 1970s, in the wake of Free Love and the Gay Liberation movement, a new hunger for the lives of sexual libertines was in the air, and Brassaï published these images of the darker side of the French capital in The Secret Paris of the 30s in 1976.
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Stiv Bators and Divine, Blitz Benefit, CBGB, 1978 © Godlis