Sabine Weiss loved to capture the “brats”, “beggars” and “little smirks” crossed in the street: this photographer, mischievous and rigorous, also known for her fashion photos published in Vogue, was the last disciple of the French humanist school. The Franco-Swiss photographer died Tuesday at her home in Paris at the age of 97, her family and team announced on Wednesday.
Like Doisneau, Boubat, Willy Ronis or Izis, Sabine Weiss has immortalized the simple life of people, without however claiming any influence. “I never thought of taking humanistic photography. A good photo should touch, be well composed and uncluttered. The sensitivity of people must be obvious ”, she affirmed in The cross.
Quite discreet personality and less known to the general public than other photographers of her time, this bubbly woman of 1 m 55, who denied having suffered from any “segregation” as a woman, wanted to establish “a constant dialogue” with her subject , considering photography as “a friendship”. “The people who know me are those who like my gaze,” she said on France Inter. I am compassionate. “
Through her photos, Sabine Weiss brought a “rare feminine gaze”, imbued with “tenderness” and an “insatiable curiosity for human beings”, say Raymond Depardon, a great admirer of her work, as well as her closest. associate, Laure Augustins.
“We became aware of her immense talent late, when she crossed the entire history of European photography and young women to embark on this profession, alone, at the time, were very rare”, regrets the 79-year-old photographer interviewed by AFP.
“We were not from the same world. She was one of the French humanists, like Robert Doisneau, about whom we spoke in the United States and who were somewhat my peers, I rather report. Our common point is a formidable interest in people, with, for Sabine, a feminine gaze, very fine, rare, ”he says. “I felt in her a compassion, and much more: tenderness, and a delicacy that men lacked”, he adds, calling himself an admiring “youngster”.
Laure Augustins, who has accompanied Sabine Weiss on a daily basis since 2011, tells AFP, with emotion, her meeting with this woman “hard at work, sparkling, humble, funny, generous, simple, spiritual”. She has given herself the “mission” of “making known as much as possible” her work, consecrated during her lifetime by nearly 160 exhibitions around the world.
“I never wait”
Born in Switzerland in 1924 and naturalized French in 1995, Sabine Weiss lived in Paris, where she had set up her studio on Boulevard Murat since 1949, her team told AFP. Post-war Paris launched her career. . There, around the 1950s, she walks, often at night, the capital with her husband, the American painter Hugh Weiss (the couple will adopt a daughter), to freeze fleeting moments: workers in action, furtive kisses, comings and goings in the subway entrances. “The capital, at the time, was bathed at night in beautiful fog. “
In these pictures, the children are very present, like this radiant little Egyptian immortalized in the open. “It’s a challenge, you have to go quickly, and I never wait! “
In what she called “my pictures of brats”, she hangs smiles, games or antics of filthy faces on torn clothes. “It’s fun to play with street children”, she said, with the desire to have been the witness of her time and to denounce injustices.
Sabine Weiss acquired her first device at 12 with her pocket money. Not at school, she learned the trade at 16 in a famous Geneva studio. Arrived in Paris in 1946, she worked for the fashion photographer Willy Maywald. The year of her marriage, in 1950, she opened her studio in the 16e arrondissement, while Doisneau introduced it to Vogue and within the Rapho agency (now Gamma-Rapho).
She frequents artistic circles, does portraits of Britten, Stravinsky, Dubuffet, Giacometti or Léger. She will work, and succeed, in several registers: reportage (she travels a lot), advertising, fashion, spectacle, architecture.
“I did everything in photography, she confided to AFP in 2020. I went to morgues, to factories, I photographed rich people, I took fashion photos… But what remains are only pictures that I took for myself, on the sly. “
“Take a picture! “
Preferring in everything sobriety to “very bright things”, she responds to orders from major magazines (Newsweek, Time, Life, Esquire, Paris Match, etc.).
Prolific and generous, Sabine Weiss bequeathed in 2017 200,000 negatives and 7,000 contact sheets to the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne. “I don’t know how many photos I took,” she told AFP in 2014. Anyway, that doesn’t mean much. “
During that same interview, the winner of the Women in Motion Prize for Photography in 2020 marveled – without nostalgia – at the digital revolution: “It’s great, it looks sharp. The exposure time, the lenses are wonderful. “
Currently, “people do not photograph so much around them, but rather themselves”, she observed with AFP in 2020, alluding to selfies.
For her, these are all traces of life that should be preserved over time. “You have to tell people: photograph, photograph people, things around you. Say it! “