That young woman who looks at the camera while holding her Rolleiflex to take a self-portrait, with a half smile, bangs and curious eyes is the photographer Sabine Weiss (Saint-Gingolph, Switzerland, 1924–Paris, 2021). In that image from 1953 he shows in his gesture the security of someone who has managed to dedicate himself to what he wanted. She before her was a girl who, stimulated by a mother who took her to museums and art galleries, had made the decision in her adolescence to dedicate herself to telling the world with her camera.
Weiss learned the trade in a studio in Geneva and left for the French capital when he was just 18 years old, in 1946. There he worked as an assistant to the fashion photographer Willy Maywald until Robert Doisneau —the author of the famous and prepared photo of The kiss— noticed her work and introduced her to the prestigious Rapho photojournalism agency in 1952. It was the gateway to being able to travel around the world, portray figures from culture and the arts, and photograph people, especially children and older, on the streets of cities where he practiced his profession, especially in Paris.
From this creative journey, which lasted for more than half a century, a hundred images can be seen until October 9 in Palafrugell (Girona), in the main exhibition of the 12th Xavier Miserachs Biennial of Photography. It is the first retrospective in Spain of whom Doisneau described as a “photographer of light and tenderness”.
Weiss, honored in 2021 at the Arles Meetings, the most important image art in Europe, then, at 97 years old, wanted to attend the opening of his exhibition in Palafrugell, entitled observing life, on July 30, but passed away on December 28. “It is an exhibition that was seen in France in 2011 and for which she herself had selected the images, all in black and white,” says the biennial’s director, Maria Planas, at the venue that hosts it, La Bòbila, a old cork factory, reminder of a past in which this wood industry was very powerful in Palafrugell. The biennial, which she invited to this newspaper, has been focused since her birth, in 1999, on documentary photography. This edition is backed by the Palafrugell City Council, the Girona Provincial Council, the Government of Catalonia and the Banco Sabadell Foundation.
“Sabine had been in love with her profession since she was a teenager,” continues Planas, referring to a woman who once humorously declared about this: “Do things you like, like photography, but also do things to earn a living. ”. Weiss also felt love for humans. In La Bòbila you can see that tenderness, her taste for capturing everyday street scenes, like young people kissing. It is just one example of what the group of photographers she joined, that of the French humanists, wanted to convey, a label that she was not enthusiastic about, but in which she can be recognized, as the only woman, together with Doisneau, Édouard Boubat, Willy Ronis and Israëlis Bidermanas, Izis, among others. Everyone wanted to show, at the end of the 1940s, that there was hope in life, even among the ruins of World War II, an aspiration that the images of the Nazi death camps had made very difficult.
Weiss had that humanistic look when he photographed modest-looking elderly people or barefoot and dirty children in the street, always with dignity, sometimes smiling, without delving into misery, which would have been easy. Among these images, the portrait of a mining boy from Lens stands out, the intense gaze of a beggar boy from Toledo, with a blackened face, or the one entitled I am a horse, one of his favorites, also in Toledo, in 1954, in which four ragged children play while one of them holds a stick in his mouth to which a rope is tied, as if it were a rein. “The only thing I have done is photograph what I bumped into on the street and that I liked”, summed up Weiss.
A few meters from the copies of children from different countries who jump, run, smoke and play, there is a gallery of portraits of cultural personalities whom he photographed, in some cases to fashion, where he worked in the fifties. He would later collaborate with the best publications in Europe and the United States, New York Times, Esquire, Life, Time… in fashion assignments, advertising and reports. To this she added the opportunity to get closer to artists thanks to her marriage in 1950 with the painter Hugh Weiss (from whom she took her last name, hers was Weber). Françoise Sagan posed before his lens with his typewriter, Samuel Beckett, Alberto Giacometti, Jeanne Moreau, Georges Bracque, Ella Fitzgerald, Ionesco with a surreal background of overturned chairs or André Breton, whom he placed on the left side of the image to show the rest horror empty of his apartment cluttered with objects. Since the mid-1950s, participation in collective and individual exhibitions has followed one another, along with the publication of books, practically until his death. Today his work can be seen, among others, at the Georges Pompidou, the MoMa and the Met in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Kyoto Museum of Modern Art…
The final section of the exhibition is made up of snapshots in which games with shadows and reflections predominate, almost always at night, such as the one entitled The running man, from 1953, in which an individual is seen hurrying away on a cobbled and partially illuminated road. “That man who runs was her husband,” explains Planas. She also highlights the façade of a two-story restaurant in which the shadowy figures in each window tell different stories. And, by way of farewell, two other shadows on the ground make up Weiss’s self-portrait with her husband, a token of love from a photographer who brought her love for people to all of her work.
A date with documentary photography
The Xavier Miserachs Biennial of Photography bears the name of this Barcelonan author because “in the seventies he began to go to Palafrugell in the summers”, says Maria Planas, director of the contest. “He was very affable, he made friends, bought a house around here and when he died in 1998, those of us who knew him decided to honor him by organizing the biennial.” In this 12th edition, together with the exhibition by Sabine Weiss, one of the Francesc Català-Roca at the Cork Museumtitled Women, in which, together with some copies of his classics, the original frames are exhibited, mainly in square format, that the author from Valls (Tarragona) took in the fifties and sixties, with doses of humor and irony. In total, about 80 photos of women of all ages and in different situations, but above all working, from carrying water, to farm work, as stenographers… This is how this appointment is added to the celebrations of the centenary of a teacher of Spanish photography of the 20th century.
Another tone is offered by the images of women that Antoni Campañà portrayed, belonging to what is known as the “red box”, the set of photos that he had hidden because they dealt with the Civil War and that one of his grandchildren found in 2018 in his garage. “Campañà worked on both sides of the conflict, without taking sides with either,” says Planas. In the Municipal Theater of Palafrugell, in an exercise in comparison, militia women can be seen at the beginning of the conflict and Falangists at the end, all in Barcelona, each wrapped in flags, and in similar gestures and attitudes, with some unpublished pieces.The biennial completes its offer with talks, debates and screenings.
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