Sabine Weiss: Un homme dans la nuit, 1950
Photobastei Postfach 9516 8036 Zürich Suisse
Photobastei pays homage to Swiss-born Sabine Weiss with a small retrospective of her life’s work that brings the 90-year-old grande dame of humanistic photography to German-speaking Switzerland for the first time. Sabine Weiss is one of the most influential photographers of the second half of the twentieth century. The hallmark of her photography is her expository approach to pictorial composition. At once mischievous and tender, she casts her eye on the world around her to create images that express the innermost being of the people she photographs. This approach, combined with a compositional technique that inextricably fuses light, gesture and vision, is something she shares with her fellow photographers and friends Ronis, Doisneau and Cartier-Bresson.
She has this to say about her loving approach to photography: “When you’re taking photographs, liking’s not enough; you have to be moved. The love of people is pure beauty. It has great weight and depth. I take photographs to hold on to the ephemeral, capture chance, keep an image of something that will disappear: gestures, attitudes, objects that are reminders of our brief lives.”
Sabine Weiss was part of the lively avantgarde scene of the 1950s and friends with many artists, writers and musicians. This resulted in her famous portraits of artists including Miró, Moore, Chagall, Bacon, César, Léger, Braque, Tinguely, Dubuffet, Arp, Giacometti, Simone de Beauvoir, Blixen, Beckett, Bernstein, Stravinsky and Casals, among others.
.jpg)
© Sabine Weiss: Place de la Concorde, 1953