‘Walking Backwards through Brassai: death, magic and love’, is a feminine rhetoric in the form of a guided walk that disrupts the curation of fine art, specially the Brassai exhibition that took place at the Hayward Gallery, London in 2001. Here I conducted a walk backwards through the exhibition, starting out and ending with Brassai’s photographs of graffiti. He collected these images under such headings as love, death and magic, and these were used as thematics for reading the city, first through intimate objects, then through a series of bars and secret brothels, and finally through the public streets of Paris at night. My wanderings through the gallery create a new network of connections between particular images of Paris made by Brassai in the 1930’s and writings of his contemporaries, and of more recent French writers and critics on architecture and space.