The creative influence of the Bauhaus, the vital and at the same time turbulent environment of the Weimar Republic, the effervescence of Paris in the thirties or the diverse sensations provoked by post-war New York. The adventures of Ilse Bing (1899-1998) are linked to decisive cities, movements and historical periods of the 20th century, although her work exceeds the programs and aesthetics of Das Neue Sehen (New Vision) or Surrealism. Certainly, the Frankfurt-born photographer always managed to escape the limitations of any norm or school. As indicated by the professor and art critic Juan Vicente Aliaga, curator of the exhibition that is exhibited in the KBr, in Bing's view, "modernity and formal innovation go hand in hand with a humanist spirit in which a social conscience nests" .
The passion for photography arose rather casually in the life of a young university student, daughter of a wealthy family of Jewish merchants, who soon changed her studies of mathematics and physics for art history. Two things sparked her enthusiasm. The first was her decision to take images with a plate camera to illustrate a dissertation she was due to present at the University of Frankfurt on the architect Friedrich Gilly. The second, her discovery of the work of Vincent van Gogh. The impact of both events will lead her to abandon academic research to dedicate herself fully to observing the world through a lens, to the inevitable disgust of her parents, convinced that this was a profession without a future.
The practice of photography became for many women of that time a tool for self-affirmation and liberation, as Ute Eskildsen, also a photographer, has pointed out. In her Parisian stage, Bing will coincide with other artists of the stature of Germaine Krull, Florence Henri, Berenice Abbott, Madame D'Ora, Nora Dumas or Gisèle Freund. For the analyst Tirza True Latimer, the irruption of these professionals occurred in step with social transformations, which witnessed the appearance of "new urban women" with defiant attitudes regarding the restrictions of petty-bourgeois morality, "such as smoking in public, driving, wearing pants, cutting their hair and adopting utensils such as the monocle that turned them into spectators, rather than spectacles”.
Unlike the traditional arts, photography did not have rigid established rules, and although its practice implied unavoidable expenses in cameras, developing or printing, it did not require a permanent artist's studio. In addition, as Gisèle Freund recalls in Photography as a Social Document, Oskar Barnack's invention of the Leica, a small-sized camera, was a revolution that "truly opened the way for modern photojournalism." In fact, Bing would end up being known as “the queen of the Leica”. As she herself would recount, when she began using it in the late twenties, "I felt that the camera was growing like an extension of my eyes and that it moved with me."
Bing takes his initial artistic steps in different publications during the Weimar Republic. In 1929 he published the photograph of the terracotta bust of a madonna in Das Illustrierte Blatt, a magazine in which texts by Walter Benjamin and images by André Kertész could be found. Bing soon stands out for works of social content or everyday scenes.
The objects of modern life and waste also arouse his curiosity, something that will remain in the Parisian and New York stages "as a metaphor for a world that destroys and abandons what it does not need or exploits", as Aliaga explains. The work Poster by Greta Garbo, Paris, 1932 is tremendously significant, where we see, on a peeling wall in the Marais district, a very worn poster in which only the lower part of the face of the Swedish actress can be glimpsed, an image of the inevitable passage of time and the relentless use of people and objects in the consumer society.
Of that incessant desire for exploration and discovery, which was also felt by other artists of the same generation, Bing herself would later say: “We wanted to show that the camera could achieve something that no brush could do, and we broke all the rules. We photograph looking at the light, use distorted perspective, and show movement as a blur. What we photographed was also new: shredded papers, dead leaves, puddles in the street. People thought it was garbage! But going against the rules opened the doors to new possibilities.”
His interest in architecture and modern urbanism, which Ernst May advocated through his magazine Das Neue Frankfurt, also began soon. May's publication also paid attention to the New Vision of the Bauhaus school professor and Hungarian photographer László Moholy-Nagy, who called for a conception of photography freed from pictorialism.
The influence of an artistic current with a language that bet on the geometrization of the image and the use of high angle or low angle views, overprints or photomontages can be traced in works by Bing such as the melancholic observation of an urban detail titled Dead sheet and tram ticket. on the sidewalk, Frankfurt, 1929, or the succession of oblique lines that form the Pommery champagne bottles, 1933, arranged in an almost military formation, an ambivalent reflection of the splendor and excesses of capitalist production.
Bing is interested in objects at rest and also in the ecstasy of movement. The discovery of the Austro-Hungarian Rudolf von Laban, creator of suggestive geometric shapes with dancing bodies, will serve as inspiration for photographs taken at the same choreographer's school that show outstretched arms or legs of dancers in the shape of a compass, symmetrically aligned.
At that time, the precise and balanced compositions, often enigmatically static, of the photographer Florence Henri captivated Bing. As Henri had already done, he decides to settle in Paris in search of new stimuli and opportunities, at a time when, after the crash of the New York Stock Exchange, magazines used to resort to archive images to avoid having to pay the photographers.
In the Paris of surrealism, Bing accentuates his interest in capturing the telluric, almost ghostly character of apparently banal inanimate objects, such as a rusty-looking chair photographed on the Champs-Élysées in 1931 or the mysterious sheet music that, thanks to the contrast of light and darkness, seem suspended in the air in Orchestra pit, Théâtre des Champs-Elysées, 1933.
The desire to capture movement is evident in his series of images on the Moulin Rouge, with the fluttering skirts of cancan dancers, or in those of the ballet L'Errante, by choreographer George Balanchine. The portrait of the dancer Gerard Willem van Loon suspended in the air, dressed only in black breeches, perfectly captures the beauty of the body in the ecstatic moment of dance. The stylized and vibrant nature of these images contrasts with the more chaotic but equally lively turmoil that sometimes permeates the street gaze. In It was so windy at the Eiffel Tower, Paris, 1931, a chopped shows the tension of the metallic lines of the construction and also the gestures of the visitors, surprised by the wind.
Despite some financial difficulties, the Parisian years are rather dreamy, endowed with a powerful poetic aura. It is a time of creative effervescence, where Bing also introduces himself, through daring compositions, into the metallic guts of the Eiffel Tower that bears witness, with realistic sobriety, to the existence of “soupes populaires”, or soup kitchens. His look over the city, which includes both dapper passers-by and beggars, recalls that of his admired Eugène Atget.
To earn a living, he began to collaborate in 1933 with the American fashion magazine Harper's Bazaar, thanks to the recommendation of the editor of the French version, Daisy Fellowes. From this lady accustomed to moving in aristocratic circles, she immortalizes elegant hats or a pair of sophisticated gloves, whose almost erotic sensuality recalls surrealist theories on the fetishistic nature of accessories.
In the French stage he also made some trips. His stay in the Netherlands, at the invitation of the publisher and artistic patron Hendrik Willem van Loon (the dancer's father), allowed him to tour Veere or Amsterdam capturing everyday moments, such as the image of a servant sweeping the street or the gaze of prostitutes supported by in a window.
Her artistic emancipation, fully consummated in Paris, will also be evident in her self-portraits, such as the one she made in 1931 with her Leica and two mirrors, where we see her duplicated, looking straight ahead and reflected to the left. Throughout her career, she will also continue to investigate her own image, with the desire to leave testimony of the different moments and vital tones of her existence.
The period of American exile, after fleeing from occupied France in 1941 with her husband, the pianist Konrad Wolff, shows a more bitter character. Bing and Wolff, also of Jewish origin, had been taken to different concentration camps, but, with no little effort, they managed to meet and embark, after a wait of months, for America, leaving their photographic work in a warehouse in France.
Job uncertainty (in order to survive, Bing will take passport photos and commissioned portraits, and will even work as a dog groomer) and the difficulties to integrate into the new scenario permeate the vision of the reverse side of a colossal architecture and the somewhat decadent details of a city, without a doubt, more inhospitable, as we see in New York: patio with hanging clothes and reflections of the sun, 1952, or Stairs with a newspaper, 1953.
Earlier, on a first trip to the North American city in 1936, Bing had already expressed the sensations that it produced in him in comparison with the French capital: “In New York, the facades have their eyes closed, it is a wall with holes, it cannot be seen. You can enter. Parisian facades are open, they are transparent. And the life behind those walls also comes out, penetrates towards the streets”.
After the war, Bing feels the need to return to Europe. On one of his visits to Paris, he goes through the markets in search of objects. The disturbing composition of Without Illusion, flea market, Paris, 1957, shows the old surrealist affiliation. The bald heads of some dolls, gouged out glass eyes, fragments of a crumpled newspaper in whose headline the words of the title can be read make up a disturbing still life that evokes, as Juan Vicente Aliaga writes, "a sensation of end, full stop ”.
Paris, continues the curator of the exhibition, “had been an essential city in his way of understanding life and in his personal and artistic development; however, in this phase of his life it was no longer an expression of the past, a landscape in ruins that fed his disenchantment”. Prefiguring, in some way, the trivialization of the era of globalized tourism, the streets that he walked now seem to him to be part of a museum. For this reason, All Paris in a Box, 1952, reduces the city to catalogues, key chains and other trinkets.
In 1959, Bing decided to give up photography, before his work began to be recognized in museums around the world, but he continued to express himself artistically, creating collages and poems, until he passed away in his near centenary age in 1998. In his words, “I wanted to do to feel mobility and needed another medium, so I turned to poetry… My poems are called snapshots without a camera”. Although she thought that she no longer had anything to add to that artistic discipline, these latest works continued to evoke images, perhaps because she, as she confessed, "I am a photographer, whatever I do."
