Sabine Weiss - A life of photographer

Sabine Weiss is one of the main representatives of French humanist photography, alongside Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Edouard Boubat or Brassaï. This current, which has experienced its golden age after the Second World War, is famous for having successfully grasped the poetry of everyday life and showed empathy the feelings, joys and sorrows of ordinary human beings.

Born in Switzerland in 1924, Sabine Weber became apprentice in a photography studio at the age of 18, and then became assistant to German photographer Willy Maywald in Paris after the war. At the time of her meeting with American painter Hugh Weiss in 1949, she became an independent photographer and joined the agency Rapho in 1952. Her personal work is quickly recognized, especially in the United States, and she works on a sustainable basis in newspapers such as newspapers New York Times, Life, Newsweek, Vogue, Le Ore, Paris Match, Esquire, Holiday. For nearly seventy years, she kept working for the international press and for many institutions and brands, training the most varied subjects.

At the end of the 1970s, his work benefited from the appeal of the general public for humanist photography of the 1950s and the re-evaluation of this movement by the institutions and photographic festivals. She then resumes a personal research, rhythmic by travels to France, Asia and Central Europe, in which a more sentimental melody is heard, focused on loneliness and thoughtful moments of existence. For ten years, the notoriety of this photographer who considered himself modestly as a craftsman rather than an artist, has experienced a spectacular progression, with successful retrospectives at the Jeu de Paume Tours, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Rencontres d’Arles and the Casa dei tre Oci in Venice. In 2017 she donated her archives to Photo Elysée in Lausanne, before receiving in 2020 the Women in Motion Award for Photography awarded by Kering and Les Rencontres d’Arles for her entire career.

Reporting, illustration, fashion, advertising, portrait, personal work: Sabine Weiss has approached all areas of photography as a challenge, a pretext for encounters and trips, a way of life and a way of self-expression, in constant sympathy with the human being. The exhibition reflects this passion for a life.

Virginie Chardin, Commissioner of the Exhibition

Unless otherwise stated, all works presented in this exhibition are original modern silver prints made by Publimod and the Black Room under the control of Sabine Weiss.

Exhibition produced by Atelier Sabine Weiss, Paris, and Photo Elysée, Lausanne, with the support of Jeu de Paume, Paris and Rencontres d’Arles.