Skip to main contentBiographyGerman photographer, active in France and the USA. Self-taught, Bing used the small-format Leica camera for most of her career, earning the nickname ‘Queen of the Leica’. She began her career producing photographic essays for German magazines in the 1920s. Inspired by the photographer Florence Henri, she went to Paris in 1930, where she produced fashion photography for Harper’s Bazaar, and garnered a reputation as a photojournalist, publishing in Le Monde Illustré and others. Bing incorporated photojournalist techniques into her artistic work and enlivened many of her images with motion (see, for example, her early 1930s photographs of dancers at the Moulin Rouge and the ballet Errante). Influenced by abstract painting, New Vision photography, and Surrealism, she built up geometric compositions from ordinary scenes, as in Three Men on Steps by the Seine (1931; London, V&A), and experimented with solarization, night photography, and cropping and enlarging. Her striking self-portrait from this period (Self-Portrait with Leica, 1931) has become a modernist icon. After some time in an internment camp in 1939–40, she moved to New York in 1941. Bing worked with the larger Rolleiflex camera and, briefly, with colour before she gave up photography completely in 1959. In the late 1970s interest in her work renewed; she was featured in many exhibitions and in 1985 she was given a retrospective at the New Orleans Museum of Art. (Source: Oxford Art Online, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T008929?q=Ilse+Bing&search=quick&pos=1&_start=1#firsthit, January 18, 2017)
Ilse Bing
American, born Germany, 1899 – 1998
Person TypeIndividual