ILSE BING (1899–1998)

Street Cleaners, 1947
Gelatin silver print
Lent by David Raymond, New York

Born in Frankfurt, Ilse Bing was one of several leading women photographers in the inter-war period. Bing studied art history at Frankfurt University, where she began taking photographs to illustrate her doctoral dissertation in architecture. By 1930, she had given up her studies and moved to Paris where she built a reputation as a photojournalist and fashion photographer and regularly exhibited her work. Self-taught, she used only the small-format Leica camera throughout her career.

Bing’s photographs embrace spontaneity, the keystone of abstract painting and surrealism. To escape the Nazis, Bing, who was Jewish, moved to New York in 1941. She experimented with night photography, cropping and enlarging, and solarization (exposing a photographic print to a light source while it is still in the developing solution) before abandoning photography in 1959 for poetry, drawing, and painting. Here, Bing captures an everyday subject—street cleaners at work—and transforms it into an abstract composition of geometric shapes.