For too long, precariousness was for Ilse Bing (Frankfurt, 1899-New York, 1998) a constant in her day to day, having to choose between lunch or dinner, money was not enough for more, and in the final stretch of her carrera survived by taking passport photos for emigrants arriving on the island of Manhattan, taking family portraits or walking dogs. She hung up her camera in 1959, when she felt she no longer had anything to say, and for decades, the German photographer recognized today as “the queen of the Leica” and emblem of the new woman between the wars, remained practically forgotten, writing poems , making collages (“snapshots without a camera”, he called them) or illustrating books. In Ilse Bing, the admirable exhibition that covers her work in the KBr of the Mapfre Foundation, we see her in one of her most famous self-portraits, she is 32 years old and stares at us through the camera lens, with her own reflected image in profile in a mirror, her eyes wide as saucers, as if she wanted to eat life or, at least, catch its vibrations.
“We are facing a very singular perspective and conception of photography, and whose work, imbued with both the New Vision and the Bauhaus and French surrealism, escapes any attempt at an orthodox classification”, warns the art critic and researcher Juan Vicente Aliaga, curator of an exhibition that brings together a set of nearly two hundred photographs from numerous collections, and in which modernity and formal innovation come together with humanism and social awareness. Bing, who died at the age of 98, “showed an unwavering determination to make his way in a world that he viewed with disdain, or even animosity, the presence of women,” stresses the commissioner.
The exhibition makes coves in the issues that interested the photographer (architecture, still lifes, dance, children, the bustle of the streets, self-portraits…), but through them you can follow the times convulsive events that she lived through: the instability and chaos of the Weimar Republic, the crash of 1929 in New York, the violence of Nazism (both she and her husband, the pianist Konrad Wolff, also a Jew, were prisoners in a camp of the South of France) or the isolation of exile in the United States, where the enthusiasm and joie de vivre of his photographs of 1930s Paris disappear and the images become more unsettling and gloomy.
“In New York the facades have their eyes closed, it is a wall with holes, you cannot enter. Parisian facades are open, they are transparent. And the life behind those walls also comes out, enters the streets ”said the photographer, who had arrived in the French capital escaping from her family control. She was the only professional who worked exclusively with the Leica, with which she portrays over and over again an Eiffel Tower in which the human figure never ceases to be seen, or the rogue nights of a decaying Moulin Rouge. She worked for magazines such as Vu, Arts et Metiers Graphiques and Le Monde Illustre, she regularly exhibited La Pléiade and when she visited New York in 1936 she was offered a position with the then young Life magazine. She preferred to return to Paris, where her future husband was waiting for her.
They returned together to the city of skyscrapers fleeing Nazism, but by then the world had changed. Also Paris, a city to which he returned occasionally once the war was over. It had happened to him like the poster of Greta Garbo that he had found in 1931 in Le Marais, the face of the great Hollywood actress who triumphed with Mata Hari, disappearing on the façade of a shabby building, a prelude to the wear and tear that the passage of time has given us. It ends up affecting everyone.
Both the Bing exhibition, as well as that of the Russian artist Anastasia Samoylova, Image cities, winner of the first edition of the KBr Photo Award and which is presented in parallel (until May 14), will be free to enter for people under 26 years of age. .
