Ilse Bing (born March 23, 1899 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany – died March 10, 1998 in New York, United States), nicknamed the Leica Queen, was a German avant-garde photographer and pioneer of photojournalism.
From 1920, she attended the University of Frankfurt where she studied mathematics and physics, which she eventually abandoned in favor of art history, beginning in 1924 a thesis on the neoclassical architect Friedrich Gilly. It was in this context that she discovered photography: her first camera, a large format Voigtländer, used to illustrate her research. In 1929, she bought a portable Leica with which she began her career as an independent photojournalist. She then contributed to Das Illustrierte Blatt, a weekly illustrated supplement to the Frankfurt newspaper. During this period, she met Mart Stam, a Bauhaus architect, whom she now accompanied by documenting his projects. Stam introduced her to Frankfurt’s avant-garde circles, where she met El Lissitzky, Kurt Schwitters, Hannah Höch, and others.
In the late 1930s, Bing moved to Paris in order to be at the heart of the art world. Her images were immediately exhibited and published in numerous magazines such as Vu, Arts et métiers graphiques, L’Art vivant, and Harper’s Bazaar. With Brassaï, Man Ray, Florence Henri, and Dora Maar, Ilse Bing helped make the city the capital of photography at the time.
At her first exhibition in 1931, at the Galerie La Pléiade, she exhibited shots of the Moulin Rouge cabaret; That same year, her participation in the 26th International Photographic Art Salon was noted by art critic Emmanuel Sougez, who called her the Queen of the Leica: Ilse Bing was at the time the only professional photographer in all of Paris, working exclusively with a 35mm Leica. Throughout the 1930s, she frequented the Groupe Annuel des Photographes alongside Lee Miller and André Kertész, learning to photograph Paris at night and to use mirrors and reflections to create dynamic and complex compositions. In the darkroom, she experimented with cropping, unusual angles, close-ups and multiple exposures of her photographs, sometimes to the point of becoming grainy. Her work, which encompasses portraits and fashion, architecture and landscape photography, is close to the Bauhaus in its abstraction, to surrealism in its poetry, and to the modernist movement (called Nouvelle Vision) in its attention to geometry. One of Bing’s best-known photographs is a self-portrait in which the viewer sees her full-face, holding a Leica to her eye, and in profile in a strategically placed mirror.
In 1931, she met Hendrik Willem van Loon, a Dutch-born American writer based in New York, who became her patron and facilitated her entry into the American art world. He introduced Bing’s work to the art dealer Julien Levy, who included her in his gallery at the exhibition “Modern European Photography: Twenty Photographers” (1932). In 1936, Van Loon arranged for Bing to visit the United States for the opening of her first solo exhibition at the June Rhodes Gallery in New York. Bing spent three months in America, where her reputation quickly grew among photographers (she met Alfred Stieglitz, among others) and critics. She also participated in the landmark presentation “Photography 1839-1937,” organized by Beaumont Newhall at the Museum of Modern Art.
In 1937, Bing married the musicologist and pianist Konrad Wolff, whom she had met in 1933. Both Jewish, they left Paris in 1940, but soon after were interned in separate camps in the south of France. They met again in Marseille and were eventually able to escape to the United States in 1941. Bing managed to take her negatives with her but had to abandon the prints, which were recovered by a friend and remained in a shipping company warehouse in France until the end of the war. Bing would later try to recover them, but unable to pay the full customs fees, she had to make a choice and leave some of them behind.
In New York, she found it increasingly difficult to make a living from photojournalism, particularly because of the increasing competition. In the 1950s, she turned first to color photography (using a large-format Rolleiflex camera), then to other forms of expression: poetry, drawing, and collage.
Her reputation is largely due to a resurgence of interest in her work in the 1970s. In 1976, she had a solo exhibition at the Lee Witkin Gallery in New York. She became one of the many forgotten or eclipsed women artists who have been rediscovered by contemporary scholars. From the mid-1980s onwards, publications and