Sabine Weiss. A Photographer’s Life

To mark the centenary of photographer Sabine Weiss’s birthday (1924-2021), f³ – freiraum für fotografie is showing a retrospective of her work for the first time in Germany.

Alongside Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis and Brassaï, Sabine Weiss is one of the most important representatives of French humanist photography. This movement, which flourished after the Second World War, is known for its sensitive portrayal of the working class on the street and in their everyday lives.

Sabine Weiss (née Weber) was born in Saint-Gingolph, Switzerland, in 1924. She completed an apprenticeship as a photographer in the studio of the renowned photographer Paul Boissonnas in Geneva and then settled in Paris, where she assisted the German fashion photographer Willy Maywald. After marrying the American painter Hugh Weiss, she worked as a freelance photographer from 1950 and joined the Rapho agency in 1952. Her photographs have been published in The New York Times, Life, Newsweek, Vogue, Le Ore, Paris Match, Esquire, Holiday and Du, among others. Weiss has held over 170 solo exhibitions and her photographs have been included in more than 80 group shows, including Edward Steichen’s famous exhibition The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955. For almost seventy years she worked for the international press, but also for numerous institutions and brands.

In the late 1970s, her artistic creation benefited from the growing recognition of post-war humanist photography by festivals and institutions. The international attention prompted her to develop a new personal body of work in black and white, characterized by a visual language that focuses on solitude, faith and the reflective moments of life.

Over the past ten years, the work of Sabine Weiss has achieved an impressive level of recognition: In 2016 and 2018, she was honored with two exhibitions at the Jeu de Paume Château de Tours and the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. In 2020, she was the winner of the Women In Motion Award for photography, which was presented to her by Kering and the Rencontres d’Arles. This was followed in 2021 by a highly acclaimed retrospective as part of the photography festival in Arles and in 2022 at the Casa dei Tre Oci in Venice. Her estate is managed by Photo Elysée in Lausanne and includes around 160,000 negatives, 7,000 contact sheets, 8,000 prints, 46,000 slides and various documentation materials.

A Photographer’s Life illuminates a photographic career that has always sympathized with human beings. Sabine Weiss saw every area of ​​photography, whether reportage, illustration, fashion, advertising, portraits or personal work, as a challenge. For her, photography was an excuse to travel, to meet people, a way of looking at life and a means of self-expression. The exhibition, on which the photographer worked until her death, tells of this lifelong passion.