Ilse Bing, called also the Queen of Leica, is an avant-garde photographer and a pioneer of photojournalism. Close to the Bauhaus by abstraction, to surrealism by poetry and to the modernist movement called New Vision by attention to geometry, her work includes portraits, fashion, architecture and landscapes. With Brassaï, Man Ray, Florence Henri and Dora Maar, she contributed to make Paris the capital of photography in the 1930s.

After studying mathematics and art history in Frankfurt and Vienna, she began photography in 1923. She started as a photojournalist and quickly became a part of the world of press and illustrated magazines: in 1929, she worked for the Das Illustrierte Blatt. Her images were immediately exposed and published in other magazines such as Vu, Arts et métiers graphiques, L’Art vivant or Harper’s Bazaar. She thus participates fully in the golden age of illustrated magazines, capturig the city and its inhabitants in a style mixing up sensitivity and modernity.