Sabine Weiss

Half century of photography

Sabine Weiss has been a photographer since childhood. She likes to look, and wonder at what she sees. Very early in life she decided to choose photography as her means of expression. After a few years of study in Geneva she moved to Paris and worked with big-name European and American magazines on reportage and advertising commissions, celebrity portraits and the fashion world. On her arrival in the capital she immortalised the Paris of the 1950s, the people's Paris with that distinctive post-war atmosphere. Sabine Weiss says this was'a magical period when gypsy horses reared on hind legs in the wastelands by Porte de Vanves'. Like her friends Doisneau or Ronis, her gaze is tender and she tries to convey her sense of wonder at everyday life. Curiosity compels her to travel the world. The USA (she married the American painter Hugh Weiss in 1950), Europe, Egypt, India, Morocco, Burma-133; She is tirelessly drawn to individuals, children, lonely women and those of modest means who find themselves cast out on the margins of society. Following her own tender and sympathetic impulses, she records encounters, small gestures, interludes of silence; she captures the subtle light of candles, street lamps, car headlights. For Sabine Weiss photography is 'linked to the instant, a fleeting and entrancing instant that you must seize and formulate, those instants of time and space in which plenitude and simplicity are united'.