Saint-Gingolph, 1924 – París, 2021
At just 17 years old, Sabine Weiss (Saint-Gingolph, Switzerland, 1924 – Paris, 2021) decided to dedicate her professional life to photography. With her father’s support, she started training in the Boissonnas studio in Geneva, where she learned all the techniques of the profession. Four years later, she decided to pursue her career in Paris, where she worked as an assistant to Willy Maywald, the renowned fashion and portrait photographer who introduced her to the city’s artistic and intellectual circles. There she met the man who would become her husband, the American painter Hugh Weiss, with whom she would share a workshop and laboratory.
Soon she received commissions from a variety of French and international newspapers and magazines. In 1952, on Robert Doisneau’s recommendation, she joined the Rapho agency and, in 1955, Edward Steichen selected some of her images to form part of the Family of Man exhibition in New York’s MoMa.
From there, she started a tireless career that would lead her to collaborate with the most important international publications and a wide spectrum of agencies, to travel around the world and to exhibit her work in major galleries and museums.
In parallel to her professional commissions, Sabine Weiss worked privately on black and white photography, a technique that she felt more comfortable with and which she would never leave behind.
Driven by a need to meet others and attracted by life on the street, children, the elderly, night-time scenes, poverty and loneliness, Weiss developed a special capacity to blend in with all environments, coming closer to humanist photography. With her technical expertise, precise framing, sense of light and rigorous composition, the photographer acquired the skill to capture emotions.
“Observing life” is Sabine Weiss’s first retrospective in Spain, with images personally selected by the artist that show her concept of photography, understood as the capacity to explain aspects of the human condition and bring out our emotions when observing the subject being photographed.
Commissioned by: Sabine Weiss, with the support of Atelier Sabine Weiss
Produced by: Atelier Grognard, Rueil-Malmaison, France
Copies made by the Paul Martínez photography studio, Colombes, France
Exhibition designed by: Biennal Fotografia Xavier Miserachs
