Exhibition
Paris : Ilse Bing
Sixty vintages prints
Ilse Bing, Fountain. Place De La Concorde, 1933, tirage argentique d’époque, 21,6 x 27,9cm, Courtesy The Estate of Ilse Bing. Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve Köln, Paris, St. Moritz
Ilse Bing, Gold Lame Evening Shoes, 1935, tirage argentique d’époque, 22,2 x 27,9cm, Courtesy The Estate of Ilse Bing. Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve Köln, Paris, St. Moritz
Ilse Bing, Merry Go Round. Street Fair, Paris, 1932, tirage argentique d’époque, 27,9 x 20,3cm, Courtesy The Estate of Ilse Bing. Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve Köln, Paris, St. Moritz
Ilse Bing, Pont des Arts, 1931, tirage argentique d’époque, 27,9 x 20,3cm, Courtesy The Estate of Ilse Bing. Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve Köln, Paris, St. Moritz
Ilse Bing, Fountain. Place De La Concorde, 1933, tirage argentique d’époque, 21,6 x 27,9cm, Courtesy The Estate of Ilse Bing. Courtesy Galerie Karsten Greve Köln, Paris, St. Moritz
As part of the Mois de la Photo 2012 in Paris, the Galerie Karsten Greve is presenting an exhibition of photographs by Ilse Bing, featuring sixty vintages prints in various formats and from different eras.
Ilse Bing is one of many photographers being presented by the gallery, which already held an exhibition of Bing’s work in March 2007 in preparation for a large sale of her works at the Drouot Montaigne auction house.
Her famous self-portraits taken with a Leica camera earned her the nickname “Queen of Leica,” given to her by the photographer and critic and Emmanuel Sougez. “This small-format camera seems to me to be an extension of my eye. It goes with me everywhere, and lets me make things more alive,” she would say. She was one of the few great female photographers of the first half of the 20th century, and one of the first female photojournalists to use the Leica in 1929.
Born in Frankfurt in 1899, she studied science before turning to art history and before her discovery, during a trip to Switzerland in 1929, of Van Gogh’s The Night Café, after which she left her studies to pursue photography and the “new vision.” The attraction to Paris and “Modernity,” was inevitable, and she moved there in 1930. The photographs she took are meandering and left to chance. Bing never pursued a predetermined subject, but what the Surrealist poet Paul Éluard called “accidental poetry.”
The photographs show views of Paris in the daytime and at night with artificial lighting, using original perspectives that favor geometry. But there are also fashion pictures, dance photos, portraits and many self-portraits.
After Paris, she was seduced by New York in 1936. Bing returned by force, after spending time in an internment camp in the camp of Gurs in the Pyrenees. In 1957, she took her first color photographs before giving up photography altogether, saying that she did not want to repeat herself, devoting herself instead to painting and above all to poetry.
She died in New York in 1998.
Bernard Perrine
Bernard.Perrine1@orange.fr
Ilse Bing
As part of the Mois de la Photo 2012
From October 27th to november 24th, 2012
Galerie Karsten Greve
5, rue Debelleyme
75003 Paris - France
+33 (0) 142 77 19 37
galerieparis@karstengreve.fr
Tuesday - Saturday 10am - 7pm
Links
http://www.galerie-karsten-greve.com
Contributors
Bernard Perrine