Sabine Weiss. A Photographer’s Life

Humanist photography, which essentially combined the philosophy of the Enlightenment with social documentary practice, emerged after the Second World War.

Photographers such as Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis and Brassaï were famous representatives. Whether reportage, illustrations, fashion, advertising, portraits of artists or personal works: Sabine Weiss saw all areas of photography as a challenge, as a pretext for encounters and travel, as a means of living and self-expression.

Using original prints, archive documents and films, the exhibition paints a portrait of a photographer who was driven by an insatiable curiosity about other people, whether in France, where she settled in 1946, in the USA or on her countless travels throughout Europe. 

In 2016 and 2018, Sabine Weiss was honored with two exhibitions at the Jeu de Paume Château de Tours and the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Centre Pompidou in Paris and received the 2020 Women In Motion Award for photography presented by Kering as part of a highly acclaimed retrospective at the Rencontres d’Arles photography festival. Due to the diverse and positive response, she agreed to open her personal archive and make her multi-layered work accessible to the public.

Sabine Weiss (née Weber) was born in Saint-Gingolph, Switzerland, in 1924. She completed an apprenticeship as a photographer in the studio of the renowned photographer Paul Boissonnas in Geneva and then settled in Paris, where she assisted the German fashion photographer Willy Maywald.

From 1949, she worked as a freelance photographer. Her photographs were published in Esquire, Vogue, Paris Match, Life and Time magazines, among others. In 1952 she joined the Rapho agency. Weiss realized over 170 solo exhibitions and was represented with her photographs in more than 80 group exhibitions, including Edward Steichen’s famous exhibition The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Her estate is managed by Photo Elysée in Lausanne and comprises around 160,000 negatives, 7,000 contact sheets, 8,000 prints, 46,000 slides and various documentary materials.

The exhibition is curated by photo historian Virginie Chardin, organized by f³ – freiraum für fotografie, produced by Sabine Weiss Studio and Photo Elysée, with the support of Jeu de Paume, Les Rencontres d’Arles and Women In Motion, a Kering program to shine a light on women in arts and culture.