Ilse Bing

In Ilse Bing’s photography, figures are blurred by motion, perspective appears warped and alternative printing techniques are utilised. Bing initially worked as a photojournalist in her native Germany, before emigrating to Paris in 1930. In France, she began working for several publications, including Le monde illustre, Regards, Vogue, Vu, and Harper’s Bazaar. Her photographs were exhibited alongside key figures of the European avant-garde, such as André Kertész and Man Ray, who likewise subverted traditional photography. At the same time, she took inspiration from the photographic processes and compositional methods of the Hungarian avant-garde painter and photographer László Moholy-Nagy. After Paris was invaded by the Nazis, Bing, who was Jewish, was interned in a concentration camp in the south of France. Following her release, she moved to New York and took up poetry as an alternative mode of artistic production. Though her photographic output was reduced, she continued to photograph until 1959, when she decided she had exhausted her creative possibilities with the medium, and turned fully to poetry.

Ilse Bing was born in Frankfurt in 1899. She studied the history of art at the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Vienna, specialising in Neo-Classical architecture. While creating the illustrations for her dissertation, she discovered her interest in photography. In 1937, her work was included in a survey exhibition of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, entitled Photography 1839–1937. The Museum of Modern Art would later, in the 1970s, purchase a significant collection of Bing’s photographs. In 1986, a travelling exhibition of her work was staged in the United States, organised by the New Orleans Museum of Art. This was followed by several solo exhibitions across the country, including one at the International Center of Photography, New York. In the 1990s, her work was exhibited several times at museums in Germany, such as Ilse Bing – Marta Hoepffner – Abisag Tüllmann. Drei Fotografinnen in Frankfurt, at the Historical Museum, Frankfurt, in 1995, and an exhibition at the Suermondt-Ludwig-Museum, Aachen, in 1996, entitled Ilse Bing – Fotografien 1929–1956. In 2004, the Victoria and Albert Museum hosted an exhibition of her work, entitled Ilse Bing: Queen of the Leica. An exhibition of the same name was staged at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2020. In 2021, Bing was included in a group exhibition, The New Woman Behind the Camera, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Her photographs can be found in museum collections internationally, including at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Jewish Museum, Berlin, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa among others. Bing died in 1998.