When Ilse Bing (Frankfurt, 1899-New York, 1998) arrived in New York for the first time in 1936, four years had passed since her prestige had crossed the Atlantic at the hands of Julian Levy, one of the gallery owners who contributed most to define his time, and whose sense of smell did not usually fail. On this occasion, the nicknamed “queen of the Leica” she arrived in order to exhibit at the June Rhodes Gallery. Both excited and overwhelmed by the scale and rhythm that the buildings offered to her careful framing, the artist photographed the city for three months. From those days dates New York, the Elevated and Methe photograph that opens the retrospective that the Fundación Mapfre dedicates to the artist, Ilse Bing. A self-portrait where many of the characteristics that define a work are expressed that, although linked to the photographic currents of the time, to the New Vision, to the teachings of the Bauhaus, and to surrealism, escapes any visual orthodoxy.
Taken from an elevated subway platform, the image is constructed through the strong diagonal lines drawn by the rooftops, and the station’s billboards. Lines that accentuate the rhythm of the city and underline the asynchrony of a landscape crowned by the imposing silhouette of the skyscrapers of Manhattan. The sky, clear and sharp, contrasts with the dark ceiling of the platform, under which, trapped within the reflection of the circular cover of a balance, the image of the photographer is reflected. She would appear as if the photographer was the only person in the room. It is an inquiry into the relationship between human beings and the city, the impartial and distant observation of a foreigner who five years later would return with her husband, the pianist Konrad Wolff, also a Jew, escaping Nazi persecution after his death. deportation to a concentration camp in the south of France.
“In New York the facades have their eyes closed, it is a wall with holes, you cannot enter. The Parisian facades are open, they are transparent. And the life behind those walls also comes out, penetrates the streets”, warned the photographer. Her distinctive way of looking at architecture and the feeling of cities would define the artistic work of this German photographer who abandoned art history studies in Frankfurt and a thesis dedicated to Friedrich Gilly, a neoclassical architect from the end of the 18th century, to dedicate herself fully into the photographic medium. As in Gilly’s work, in Bing the use of geometric shapes is combined with emotion. Her fascination with high-angle shots and sharp angles, with contrasts, as well as with abstraction, does not imply the exclusion of a human component. “We are facing a very unique look and conception of photography in which modernity and formal innovation go hand in hand with a humanistic spirit in which a social conscience nests”, writes Juan Vicente Aliaga, curator of the exhibition, in the catalog that accompanies her Thus, her gaze in front of the architectural spectacle of New York was never entirely complacent. “The strength of the symbolic power of vertical architecture is called into question when juxtaposed with humble spaces and premises,” warns the curator.
Bing exemplifies the new woman of the interwar period; her camera was not only a vehicle for artistic expression but also for self-determination. She admired the work of Florence Henri, this Bauhaus student’s penchant for exploring spatial relationships, her suggestive use of mirrors to accommodate new perspectives, and her rigorous compositional control. However, the fact that Bing took as an example a photographer who made pure compositions the axis of her work and whose creative space was limited to the studio is something that might initially surprise an “enthusiastic of the dynamic and the movement of photography”. life, that is to say of the pulsating and changing reality”, emphasizes the curator. Behind that admiration was also the fact that the setting where Henri developed her art was Paris.
When Ilse Bing arrived in Paris in 1930, her tendency to look at the ground, in search of elements that had gone unnoticed and had been brought together by chance, was accentuated. A practice that in a certain way fit within the representation of the non-literal object but wrapped in the enigma promulgated by the surrealists and that entailed an intense poetic explosion. Similarly, the photographer made use of solarization, both in her portraits and in her still lifes, although she claimed to have arrived at the practice independently of Man Ray, Lee Miller, or Moholy-Nagy.
Although inanimate objects are a constant in the photographer’s work, dance and images in full movement do so at the same time. Both manifestations harbor “mystery and reality” at the same time, as the critic and photographer Emmanuel Sougez observed, who would be fascinated by the “intentional blur” of the dancing figures, when seeing for the first time the work of the German artist in a shop window of the gallery of La Pléiade. “Bing’s photography is artifice and restraint, which made it, according to Sougez, French,” says Aliaga.
It was so windy at the Eiffel Tower It is one of the most reproduced images of the photographer. A photograph taken again looking down to capture the moment when a group of visitors is surprised by a gust of wind, as they walk between the metal structures of the emblematic Parisian architectural work.”A crowd that moves and is seen by Bing , remains inserted, trapped between the lines and the metal triangles”, says Aliaga. Something that could be “a harbinger of unfortunate times to come in which individuals converted en masse would lose their freedom, brutalized by the totalitarian pack”, as Benjamin HD Buchloh observed.
Fashion is also present in the exhibition through the collaborations that the photographer had with the magazine Harper’s Bazaar. Through the application of an approach that intensified the shine and texture of the objects, and their careful compositions, the garments acquired the sensual touch of a coveted object. A dimension “that could be called erotic”, Aliaga clarifies, and “that fit perfectly with certain surrealist theories about the fetishistic nature of certain accessories”.
Precariousness was a constant throughout the life of the photographer despite the great artistic recognition she achieved in times of political and economic instability. She settled in New York, where she ended her days, she was able to return to Paris occasionally and, once the war was over, to photograph the city that she loved so much from a different point of view. A city that she had ceased to be the same, turned into a gigantic museum. It would seem as if the splendor of her had a place in a box of souvenirsas bitter irony reflects All Paris in a box. In 1959, Bing gave up photography. As an artist in exile he experienced cultural and professional helplessness. he started to do collages with old photographs and to write poems. He would refer to his poetry as “snapshots without a camera”.
Ilse Bing, Mapfre Foundation. Madrid. Until January 8.
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