PARIS.- The exhibition staged in the Galerie de Photographies features nearly 80 vintage photographs by Sabine Weiss, mostly unpublished, on the theme of the street. Dating from 1945 to 1960, they come from a group purchased by the Musée National d’Art Moderne and a recent donation by the photographer, who decided to entrust a large selection of her works to the Centre Pompidou.

Sabine Weiss is now the last representative of the great «Humanist» photography movement. The images produced within this typically French movement have often misguidedly been seen as sentimentalist. French humanist photographers, who mostly worked with the Rapho agency (Edouard Boubat, Robert Doisneau, Jeanine Niepce and Willy Ronis, among others), provided a record of their times through their sociological, non-critical observations. Like her colleagues, Sabine Weiss was interested in everyday life. In these photographs taken for herself in her spare time, she provides a gentle, sympathetic view of residents in her town, seeking out simple scenes of beauty in suspended moments of rest or reverie, without concealing the poverty of daily life in post-war Europe. Her works are full of light, making play with shadows and blurred areas, and above all illustrate her committed reconciliation with reality. The exhibition takes a fresh look at her rich and varied output, which goes well beyond the context of Humanist photography alone. This new interpretation of her work is achieved by comparing her personal archives with her own works and those of four contemporary artists – Viktoria Binschtok, Paul Graham, Lise Sarfati and Paola Yacoub –, who also worked on the theme of the street and the contemporary city. Their approaches are radically different, but echo the photographer’s in many ways.

Born in 1924, in Switzerland, Sabine Weiss became interested in photography very early on, and decided to make her passion her career. During the war, she worked as an apprentice at the Boissonnas Studio in Geneva, and moved to Paris after the Armistice. She worked for several years with the photographer Willy Maywald, who introduced her to the world of fashion and Paris high society. Shortly afterwards she set up as an independent photographer and was frequently published in the illustrated press, including Paris Match, the New York Times, Life, Picture Post and Die Woche. She published her first photo report at the age of 21 in 1945. At 28, she took part in the exhibition «Post-War European Photography» at the MoMA New York and joined the Rapho agency. In 1954, the Art Institute of Chicago devoted a solo exhibition to her, which toured the USA. The following year, 1955, three of her pictures featured in the MOMA’s exhibition «The Family of Man». She also worked for the French edition of Vogue throughout the 1950s, producing foreign reports and advertisements for leading communication agencies. At the same time, she devoted herself to more personal work, photographing children playing in the wasteland of her neighbourhood, Porte de Saint-Cloud, as well as Paris and its daily life, Metro, fleamarkets and so on.