Sabine Weiss: Seeing Moments
Sabine Weiss photographed people.
Children playing in streets. Weddings. Lovers. Workers. Mothers. Cafés. Religious celebrations, laughter, dancing.
Born in Switzerland in 1924, she trained professionally in Geneva before moving to Paris in 1946. She worked in fashion and advertising, photographed artists and writers, and joined the Rapho agency in 1952 after Robert Doisneau saw her work.
But the photographs she made for herself were different.
She went into the streets.
Weiss became associated with the French school of humanist photography, alongside photographers such as Doisneau and Willy Ronis. Its subject was ordinary human life, especially the small encounters and gestures that rarely become history.
Photography also gave Weiss an excuse to travel. She worked throughout France, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Egypt, Britain, Germany and farther afield, photographing local life rather than searching only for major events. She once described photography as a way of seeing everything, going everywhere and communicating with everyone.
In 1953, Weiss photographed a Roma wedding in Tarascon, southern France.
A small boy dances in the center while the adults around him clap.
Children appear throughout Weiss's work. She was interested in them precisely because their emotions were less guarded. In the Jeu de Paume's study of her archive, children are described as revealing feelings that adults have learned to control or conceal.
The wedding became one of her best-known photographs.
What we see is a boy having a wonderful time.
A year later, Weiss was in Olhão, a fishing town in Portugal's Algarve.
Her photograph shows a mother holding a baby in a narrow street. Children stand behind her. Laundry hangs overhead.
Weiss called the series Village moderne de pêcheurs — modern fishing village.
She was interested in how people actually lived: streets, work, families, customs and the small gestures between them. Her assignments took her across Europe, but daily life remained the subject she returned to.
In 1955, Edward Steichen included three of Weiss's photographs in MoMA's landmark exhibition The Family of Man, built around the idea that photography could show experiences shared across countries and cultures.
That idea fits her work remarkably well.
Not because everybody's life is the same.
Because everywhere she went, people were just going about days as people.
For this month, that is the world I want to look at.
Comments