Sabine Weiss

Sabine Weiss was born in Saint-Gingolph, Switzerland, in 1924. Introduced to photography at an early age, she learned the craft in Geneva at the Boissonnas studio. In 1945 she opened her own studio, before moving to Paris permanently in 1946. There she became assistant to the fashion photographer Willy Maywald. In 1950, she married the American painter Hugh Weiss and began working as a freelance photographer. In 1952, Robert Doisneau asked her to join him at the Rapho agency, which also managed the work of Willy Ronis and Edouard Boubat. She frequented artistic circles, immortalising many of their faces, among them : Stravinsky, Casals, Britten, Dubuffet, Léger, Giacometti and Raushenberg. In 1955, Edward Steichen selected three of her photographs for the legendary ‘Family of Man’ exhibition at MoMA in New York. She worked on a number of commissions, moving between fashion, reportage and advertising. This enabled her to pursue more personal research, illustrating the human condition and linking her work to the humanist photography movement. Her images have been the subject of numerous exhibitions around the world. They can be found in prestigious collections (MoMa and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Centre Georges Pompidou, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, etc.). An Officier des Arts et des Lettres since 1999, Sabine Weiss was awarded the insignia of Chevalier in the Order of Merit in 2010. Source : https://sabineweissphotographe.fr