From DIESELPUNKS
by Eva Kamm
I'd like to present a
remarkable lady photographer.
In Three Days of the
Condor, a CIA agent played by Robert Redford says that photographic work of his
new acquaintance (Faye Dunaway) epitomize desolation. When I look at Ilse Bing
photographs, I remember this phrase. Some of her shots have an air of poetic
desolation about them.
Ilse Bing (1899-1998) was
a leader among those who made Paris the center of modern photography in the
1930s. Moving in a milieu that included the likes of Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray,
and Brassaï, she came to be known as “Queen of the Leica” for her influential
mastery of the hand-held camera that revolutionized the medium in the period.
Born into a bourgeois
Jewish family in Frankfurt, Ilse Bing seemed set for an academic career but
abandoned it to devote herself to photography.
Moving to Paris in 1930,
Bing instantly loved the city. She participated in the avante-garde movement
that affected all aspects of creative life: exhibitions, journals,
performances. The leaders were largely self-taught émigré artists such as Man
Ray, André Kertesz, Paver Tchelitchev, Germaine Krull, and Florence Henri.
Tchelitchev commissioned Bing to photograph a ballet Errante, using only
ambient light. The results were acclaimed. The Leitz Corporation was so
impressed that they sent her new wide-angle and telephoto lenses for
experimentation. She worked for the fashion designer Schiaparelli, Harper’s
Bazaar, Vu, and various weekly newspapers.
After Hitler’s rise to
power in 1933, she refused to work for German magazines. She built a successful
career doing architectural, advertising, theater, and portrait photography. Her
art photography was shown in leading galleries and exhibitions. By 1932, her
work was exhibited in New York at Julien Levy’s gallery.
She won commercial success
even while establishing herself at the forefront of the city’s avant-garde, and
she forged a distinctive personal style by blending all the vital currents that
were then shaping the medium. She adored the romanticism, symbolism and
dream-imagery of Surrealism; she shared the technological enthusiasms and love
of startling perspectives that intrigued advocates of ‘New Vision’ photography;
and she accepted the creed of documentary photographers who were striving to
produce truer and more incisive records of the world.
The outbreak of the Second World War changed everything. In 1940 Bing and Wolff were forced to leave Paris and, both Jews, were interned in separate camps in the South of France. Bing spent six weeks in a camp in Gurs, in the Pyrenees, before rejoining her husband in Marseille, which was under 'Vichy' control. The couple spent nine months there, awaiting visas for America. Eventually, with the support of the fashion editor of Harpers Bazaar, they were able to leave for America in June 1941.
Although Bing had managed
to take her negatives with her and keep them with her in the camp, she left all
her prints behind in Paris in the safekeeping of a friend. This friend then
sent them on to Marseille but Bing and her husband had left France before the
photographs arrived. The prints remained in a shipping company's warehouse in
Marseille, miraculously missing the many bombs that fell on the port, until the
end of the War, when they were dispatched to Bing in New York. Tragically
though, when they arrived, Bing was unable to pay customs duty on all of them,
and had to sift through the prints, deciding which to keep and which to throw
away. Some of her most important vintage prints, including the only photographs
Bing had taken in England, were lost at this time.
She continued to take
portraits (making children a specialty) and exhibited her work throughout the
late 1940s and early 1950s. From about 1950 she started to work with the larger
format Rolleiflex camera, experimenting with greater tonal contrast and flash.
In 1957 she took up colour photography. Equipped with such technical expertise
- she was producing very fine prints at this period - she began to take on
private students to provide an income.
On her two visits to Paris
after the War, in 1947 and 1952, Bing took many photographs of the city that
she had loved so much in the 1930s. According to Bing, these later Paris
photographs are infused with different spirit. Influenced by the War, Bing
suggests that she saw things less in relation to a binding atmosphere or whole
but on a more impersonal, isolated level.
In the late 1950s, Bing
eventually gave up photography, wanting to go beyond the figurative and work in
a more generalized, abstract mode with poems and line drawings, and later,
collage. Bing’s work was rediscovered after being included in a 1976 exhibition
at the Museum of Modern Art and a subsequent exhibition at the Witkin Gallery.
A retrospective exhibition of her work was organized by the New Orleans Museum
of Art in 1985, followed by exhibitions at the International Center of
Photography in New York, the Baltimore Museum, and Musée Carnavalet in Paris.
In 1993, the National Arts Club awarded her their Gold Medal for photography.
Bing died in Paris on March 10, 1998, just before her ninety-ninth birthday.
Ilse Bing photographed a recreation of her 1931 self portrait
Her Self-Portrait with
Leica (1931, headline photo) remains an icon of modernist photography, and an
emblem of a time when many women were embracing modernity and independence,
along with the new opportunities that technology afforded for artistic
expression.
________________________________________________________________________________________
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