Ilse Bing (1899-1998) was a German Avante-Garde artist and commerical photographer. Bing produced her most well-known work during the interwar era.
-Bing’s photgraphic style was dubbed “documentary humanism”.
-In 1959, Bing stated that she “had said all that she had to say with photography” and thereafter chose to focus on drawing and poetry.
“Her friendship with figures associated with the Bauhaus, including the architect Martin Stam and the photographer Florence Henri, as well as her acquaintance with André Kertész in Paris, encouraged her tendency toward the formalist techniques of modernist photography. Like László Moholy-Nagy, the self taught Bing turned her photographs upside-down and sideways to assess their compositional relationships; like Kurt Schwitters, she was attracted to the banal details of urban living--torn tram tickets, gate latches, and other apparently minor objects.”
- International Centre of Photography
“I felt that the camera grew an extension of my eyes and moved with me.”
-Isle Bing, (quote pulled from MOMA article on her).
