“I realized very young that photography would be my means of expression. I was more visual than intellectual. I was not very good at studying. I left high school. I left on a summer day on a bicycle.”
~ Sabine Weiss
(1924-2021)
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Well Sabine left on a bicycle from her small Swiss town to Geneva and never returned. She apprenticed to a photographer there for a couple of years then she did the gutsy thing of without knowing anyone or having any money she moved to Paris and apprenticed to a fashion photographer, Willy Maywald. After some years there when she thought she was ready to go out into the precarious world of freelance photography, that is exactly what she did and slowly established herself and never looked back. She worked nonstop on assignment with ferocious intensity solving compositional and technical problems for all the major magazines and her commercial clients, but she still managed to do her own self-directed work and created a body of humanist imagery equal to all her contemporaries like Boubat, Doisneau, Ronis, Izis and others.
When you sat with her, even at the age of 96 years old, the intensity and drive for perfection was still there and her passion was contagious. I love night imagery and this is one of the best and one of her greatest images. She enlisted her husband, the American painter Hugo Weiss, to venture out into that Paris cold night air and she came back with some magic. It is almost like a frame from a great Film Noir "nouvelle vague” piece of French Cinema, full of mystery and suspense.
Sabine's images are included in our current exhibition, “Her: The Great Women Photographers” on view until November 23rd, 2024. The exhibition features a selection of images from some of the greatest women photographers from across the world.
Works by: Lillian Bassman | Sarah Moon | Ruth Bernhard | Julia Margaret Cameron | Cig Harvey | Bernice Abbott | Judy Dater | Eve Arnold | Doris Ullmann | Martine Franck | Flor Garduno | Judy Glickman Lauder | Nikki Kahn | Lilo Raymond | Ilona Langbroek | Grace Robertson | Anastasia Samoylova | Sabine Weiss
We can't wait for you to join us for the exhibition.
For any questions or inquiries, please email peter@peterfetterman.com
