About the Book
German photographer Ilse Bing (1899-1998) has secured her place as one of the major photographers of the 20th century. Her pioneering images during the inter-war era reveal a modern vision influenced by the impact of both the Bauhaus and Surrealism. Alongside her personal work she produced images in the fields of photojournalism, architectural photography, advertising and fashion, and her work was published in the major magazines of the period and exhibited in France and Germany.
She moved from Frankfurt to Paris in 1931 but when the city was taken by the Germans during World War II she and her husband, who were both Jews, were expelled and interned in the South of France. They emigrated to New York in 1941 and she lived there until her death in 1998.
The book offers a chronological and thematic survey of Bing’s intense creative career and includes over 160 photographs as well as texts by leading experts Juan Vicente Aliaga, Benjamin Buchloh and Donna West Brett. Publisher’s Info
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About the Artist
Ilse Bing (Frankfurt, 1899-New York, 1998) was born into a well-off Jewish family. Having discovered her true vocation while preparing the illustrations for her academic thesis, in 1929 she abandoned her university studies in order to focus entirely on photography. The medium would be her chosen form of expression for the following thirty years of her fascinating life and career.
In 1930 Bing moved to Paris where she combined photojournalism with her own more personal work, soon becoming one of the principal representatives of the modernising trends in photography which emerged in the cultural melting pot of Paris during those years. With the advance of the Nazi forces, in 1941 she and her husband, the pianist Konrad Wolff, went into exile in New York. Two decades later the sixty-year-old Bing gave up her photographic activities in order to channel her creativity into the visual arts and poetry until her death in 1998.
Bing’s work cannot be ascribed to any of the movements or tendencies that influenced her. She worked in almost all the artistic genres, from architectural photography to portraiture, self-portraits, images of everyday objects and landscapes. The diversity of styles which she employed reflect her significant and notably individual interpretation of the different cultural trends that she assimilated, from the German Bauhaus and New Objectivity to Parisian Surrealism and the ceaseless dynamism of New York.
Exhibition: Ilse Bing at Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid from September 23, 2022, to January 8, 2023. Download the exhibition brochure here.
Video: On View Now: Ilse Bing, Queen of the Leica by Cleveland Museum of Art, 2020 (Youtube)
Film: Drei Fotografinnen: Ilse Bing, Grete Stern, Ellen Auerbach. Documentary by Antonia Lerch. DVD, 165 min., 1993, absolutmedien, ISBN 978-3-89848-845-7.