PARIS.- Swiss photographer Sabine Weiss has been photographing people with the same unflaggingly tender curiosity for 45 years. Assistant to fashion photographer Willy Maywald in the late 1940s, she was trained in the best studio lighting techniques and this experience paradoxically helped her to understand the full potential of natural light to convey emotion. A member of the Rapho agency since 1953, she has become associated with a line of so-called 'humanist' photographers who played a key role in the history of the 1950s and 60s. She has produced many fashion pieces and portraits of celebrities and artists (Giacometti, Braque, etc) for Vogue magazine.

An important and regular contributor to the American press, she has also produced interior design photos for international magazines, as well as publicity work. She applies the same skill and sensitivity to reportage in a wide variety of subject fields. In addition to her commissioned work, she has always made pictures 'for herself'. During her travels she has gradually turned almost exclusively to black and white reportage, a medium that expresses the relationship between Man and his world more "calmly and simply" and which captures the plenitude of light that has been her obsession. Creating endless dialogues as she travels with her camera, her eye translates the poignant moment where a gesture or a posture suddenly reveals the entire essence of a person.