In 1976, after several decades of obscurity, the seventy-seven-year-old Ilse Bing was given an exclusive exhibition by Lee Witkin, the noted New York photography gallery owner. It was her first in seventeen years, and it caught the notice of the increasing number of institutional and private collectors of photographs. The New Orleans Museum of Art was among them and purchased several for its growing photography collection. In 1985, the museum organized a major touring exhibition of Ilse Bing's photographs. What drew such attention at Witkin's 1976 show was the beauty of the craftsmanship and artistic vision of Bing's photographs. Here was a personal vision that based the unposed naturalism of the miniature 35-mm camera on an underpinning of rigorous pictorial organization. The techniques were those used in photojournalism, but these were not simply objective documents of reality, but reality transformed, producing what a French critic of the 1930s called, "the enchantment surrounding reality." Ilse Bing's photographs, the earliest 1928, the latest 1959, recorded people's lives first in Frankfurt, then Paris, and lastly New York, after 1941. They are spontaneous yet measured, intuitive, and equally controlled, fusing the precision of science with the poetry of art.
Creative Explosion
What gives Ilse Bing's European photographs their particular freshness, perhaps, is the aura of the 1920s and 1930s. These were decades during which an explosion of photographic creativity stretched the capabilities of the medium and determined its development for the next fifty years. Modern photojournalism came into being, and photography achieved prominence in the evolving fields of advertising illustration, scientific research, and industrial production. The miniature 35-mm camera, the telephoto and wide-angle lens, and the modern flashbulb were developed, and photographers experimented with these new processes with exuberant abandon. At the same time, stylistic innovations issued from Dada, the New Vision of the Bauhaus, New Objectivity painting, and Surrealism. The decades-old dichotomy between fine art and commercial photography was severed, and photography reveled in its newfound vitality as the premier means of mass communication.
During the 1920s and 1930s, photography became the most exciting of the arts for the European avant-garde. These artists and thinkers were enthralled with machines and industrial productions, both as symbols of modernity and as solutions to the problems of contemporary society. Photographs were glorified as products of machines that not only required little training to operate but that also had practical application in science and industry. Franz Roh in Germany called photographers, "Raphaels without hands," and the Parisian art critic Waldemar George wrote in the first issue of Photographie that "photography is the marvelous accord of machine and man....Our age will be the golden age of photography."
Ilse Bing came of age in this milieu, a well-bred and well-educated young woman from an affluent Frankfurt family. She took up photography in 1928, initially, to make illustrations for her doctoral dissertation in art history at the University of Frankfurt. She shocked her bourgeois family the following year when she renounced a Fraulein Doktor title to become an artist, and even more troubling, an artist who used a camera as her artistic tool. She had taken up the newly produced Leica camera and, like other young, well-educated, and unemployed Germans, had begun marketing the intimate,
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