Ilse Bing

(March, 23, 1899, Frankfurt, Germany – March, 10 1998, NYC, USA)

Ilse Bing was a German photographer. His family was a successful and wealthy saga of Jewish merchants, the path his father followed.

He studied Art History at the University of Frankfurt, although he had started his university studies in the fields of mathematics and physics. As an important complement to his training, during the academic year 1923 / -24 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. His learning of photography was done by himself in 1925 in order to illustrate his thesis on the architect Friedrich Gilly, four years later he bought a Leica camera that he used for twenty years as his main machine.

In 1930 he moved to Paris where he met André Kertész, Emmanuel Sougez and Florence Henri and made reports for various magazines such as Das Illustrierte Blatt, Ars et Métiers Graphiques, Photo-Graphie, Vu and Harper’s Bazaar. Sougez gave her the name “Queen of Leica”. He made his first exhibition at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in 1932 as part of an exhibition of European photography and in 1937 he participated in the exhibition organized by Beaumont Newhall at the Museum of Modern Art in New York with the title of Photography (1839- 1937).

In 1937 she married the pianist Konrad Wolff with whom she emigrated to the United States in 1941, since they were Jews and Nazi Germany dominated Europe. They settled in New York. In 1946 Ilse adopted the American nationality. Although he traveled to Paris several times in the 1950s, his photographic activity lost experimental content and became more conventional. However, she continued taking black and white photographs until 1957, when she began taking color photographs that she herself revealed.

In 1959 he abandoned photography to devote himself to poetry, painting and collage. His work was valued again after a group exhibition held in 1976 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and at the Art Institute of Chicago. Since then his work has been exhibited in museums around the world such as New Orleans in 1985, at the Carnavalet Museum in 1987, at the Folkwang Museum in 1994, at the Ludwig Museum in 1996, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in 2004 , in Paris in 2007 and in Barcelona in 2009.

Some of her Photos