Eiffel Tower, Paris

Ilse Bing abandoned her native Frankfurt and her training as an art historian to become a photographer in Paris, where she spent most of the 1930s. "In Paris," she later said, "I truly became myself." She began providing the burgeoning French picture press with fashion and social documentary photographs, becoming so proficient with her lightweight, unobtrusive camera that she eventually became known as the "Queen of the Leica." In her photograph of the Eiffel Tower, she found an ideal subject for more avant-garde expression, emphasizing abstract geometry in a vertiginous composition. The noted New York dealer Julien Levy introduced Bing's work, including several views of Paris, to an American audience in a landmark 1932 show, Modern European Photography: Twenty Photographers.