The French-Swiss photographer Sabine Weiss, considered the last disciple of the French humanist school, died Tuesday at his home in Paris at age 97, his family and team said in a statement Wednesday.
Born in Switzerland in 1924, Weiss lived in Paris, where she had her workshop installed, her team told AFP.
Like Doisneau, Boubat, Willy Ronis or Izis, Sabine Weiss immortalized the simple life of the people, without showing off or arrogance.
“I never considered what I was doing humanistic photography. A good photo should move, be well composed and naked, “he told the newspaper. The cross.
Photography Award Winner Women in Motion in 2020, Sabine Weiss He has starred in some 160 exhibitions around the world.
Born Weber on July 23, 1924 in Saint-GingolphOn the shores of Lake Geneva, Sabine Weiss acquired her first camera with her pocket money at the age of 12 and learned the trade at age 16 in a famous Geneva studio. He came to Paris in 1946 and started working for the fashion photographer Willy Maywald.
A pioneer of postwar photography, eclectic in training, and a lover of both color and black and white, she saw her career take off in 1950s Paris.
“Artisan of photography”
“From the beginning I had to make a living from photography, it was not something artistic,” Weiss told AFP in an interview in 2014. “It was a trade, I was an artisan of photography,” she stressed.
The year of his marriage, 1950, he opened his studio in the 16th arrondissement; in the same period, Doisneau introduced her to Vogue and the Rapho agency (now Gamma-Rapho).
He began to frequent the artistic circles of the time, portraying Stravinsky, Britten, Dubuffet, Léger or Giacometti. He worked for renowned magazines such as Newsweek, Time, Life, Esquire, or Paris-Match, and triumphed in several registers: from reporting (he traveled a lot), to advertising, fashion, entertainment or architecture.
With a discreet personality and less known to the general public than other photographers of her time, this effervescent woman of little more than five feet denied having suffered “discrimination” as a woman.
“I detected in her not only compassion, but also a tenderness and sweetness that men did not have,” the French photographer and documentary filmmaker told AFP on Wednesday Raymond Depardon.
From morgues to fashion photos
Above all, Weiss tirelessly toured the French capital, sometimes with her husband, the American painter. Hugh Weiss, many times at night, to freeze fleeting moments: workers in action, furtive kisses, comings and goings in the subway … With his camera, he said, he liked to capture the “brats”, the “beggars” or the “smiles “that was crossed in the street.
“At that time, the capital, at night, was covered with a beautiful fog,” he recalled.
“In photography I have done everything,” he confided to AFP in 2020. “I went to morgues, factories, I photographed rich people, I took fashion photos … But what remains are only the photos I took just for myself, about the march, “he said.
Prolific and generous, in 2017 it left some 200,000 negatives and 7,000 contact sheets to the Elysee Museum in Lausanne, in Switzerland. “I don’t know how many photos I took,” he told AFP in 2014, “anyway that doesn’t mean much.”
Renowned for her prowess with black and white photography, Weiss welcomed the arrival of the digital cameras, though not the advent of the selfie.
“People no longer photograph the world around them, they photograph themselves,” he explained to AFP. “Tell people to take pictures … of your surroundings. Tell them that,” he insisted.
Reference-www.eleconomista.com.mx