Sabine Weiss, occupies a unique place in French photography, she is one of the most famous women photographers in the world.
Copyright Sabine Weiss
A wide variety of fields
Last representative of the humanist school, embodied by Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Édouard Boubat or Brassaï, Sabine Weiss (born in 1924) occupies a unique place within French photography. For nearly sixty years, she has explored a wide variety of fields, from reportage to portraiture and from fashion to advertising, alongside more personal essays.
Throughout her many wanderings, she has worked for the French and international illustrated press, with an undeniable passion and an insatiable curiosity.
Copyright Sabine Weiss
Copyright Sabine Weiss
Copyright Sabine Weiss
The humanist school
Sabine Weiss was born in Saint-Gingolph (Switzerland) on July 23, 1924. Introduced to photography at a very young age, she learned the trade in Geneva at the Boissonnas studio.
With her diploma in hand, she opened her own studio in 1945, before leaving permanently for Paris in 1946. There she became the assistant of 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 him to join him at the Rapho agency, which also managed the work of Willy Ronis and Edouard Boubat.
She frequents artistic circles of which she immortalizes many faces (Stravinsky, Casals, Britten, Dubuffet, Léger, Giacometti, Raushenberg…).
In 1955, Edward Steichen selected three of his photos for the mythical “Family of Man” exhibition at MoMA in New York.
She does a lot of commissioned work, navigating between fashion, reportage and advertising.
She can thus pursue more personal research, which illustrates the human condition and links her work to the current of humanist photography.
His images have been the subject of many exhibitions around the world.
They can be found in prestigious collections (MoMa and Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Center Georges Pompidou, Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, etc.).
Officer of Arts and Letters since 1999, Sabine Weiss received in 2010 the insignia of Knight in the Order of Merit.
