Bing, Ilse

German, 1899-1998

BiographyIlse Bing was a leading photographer during the inter-war era. She studied art history before moving to Paris in 1929 to begin her career as a photojournalist and quickly rose to prominence as one of the first to use electronic flash, solarization, and the Lecia 35-millimeter camera. Bing also experimented with rotation and cropping to forge new compositional relationships between her subjects. In both her commercial and avant-garde work, she explored shadow, contrast, and symmetry in the emerging language of modernism, setting the groundwork for the techniques later associated with humanist photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Dorothea Lange. Her contribution to photography was historically understated until the mid 1970s when a solo exhibition at the Lee Witkin Gallery in New York revived interest in her work, followed by major retrospectives at International Center for Photography and New Orleans Museum of Art.

Ilse Bing was born to a wealthy Jewish family in Frankfurt, Germany. She lived and worked in Paris from 1929-1940. During this time, her work was included in the first modern photography exhibition at the Louvre in 1936 and then, the following year, in Museum of Modern Art’s landmark exhibition Photography 1839-1937. In 1940, when Paris was taken by Germany at the start of World War II, Bing was held in an internment camp for six weeks and emigrated permanently to New York City shortly after her release. She retired from photography in 1959 and dedicated the rest of her life to poetry, drawing, and collage. Bing’s images are in the permanent collections of Art Institute of Chicago; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Jewish Museum, Berlin, New York; and many others.