Ilse Bing

(1899 – 1998)

Ilse Bing was a German avant-garde and commercial photographer who produced pioneering monochrome images during the inter-war era. Ilse Bing always took photos from a very individual point of view, both for portraits and for countless architectural photos. What they work best characterizes enlargement of fragments of 35mm film her Leica and the resulting idiosyncratic cropping.Although Bing experimented a lot, her photographs often seem characterized by a natural perfection. While the photographer's access to her craft was often spontaneous and intuitive, it was also characterized by great care and precision. Her work was shaped by contemporary abstract and non-representational painting as well as by New Vision and Surrealism.Since working in the darkroom had a significant impact on the results and appearance of Bing's photography, she always developed her negatives herself. She also discovered a type of solarisation for negatives independently of a similar process developed by the artist Man Ray.