Lamp Posts

Ilse Bing’s career reflects the freedoms photography offered women in the early twentieth century. Born in Germany, Bing moved to Paris in 1930, where she contributed to the emerging picture press and made her career alongside André Kertész, Man Ray, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Dubbed “Queen of the Leica” for her mastery of the new handheld 35mm camera, Bing combined trenchant observation with dizzying viewpoints, off-kilter angles, and abrupt cropping. She particularly liked the experimentation necessitated by working at night: this otherworldly image from her Paris streetlights series, for example, uses darkroom solarization (partial reversal of light and dark tones) to heighten an atmosphere of mystery. Photography editor Emmanuel Sougez wrote in 1934 that in Bing’s work we can see “a magic halo, an enchantment surrounding reality.”