Sabine Weiss. Les Villes, la rue, l’autre

About

The exhibition staged in the Galerie de Photographies features nearly 80 vintage photographs by Sabine Weiss, mostly unpublished, on the theme of the street. Dating from 1945 to 1960, they come from a group purchased by the Musée National d’Art Moderne and a recent donation by the photographer, who decided to entrust a large selection of her works to the Centre Pompidou.

Sabine Weiss is now the last representative of the great «Humanist» photography movement. The images produced within this typically French movement have often misguidedly been seen as sentimentalist. French humanist photographers, who mostly worked with the Rapho agency (Edouard Boubat, Robert Doisneau, Jeanine Niepce and Willy Ronis, among others), provided a record of their times through their sociological, non-critical observations. Like her colleagues, Sabine Weiss was interested in everyday life. In these photographs taken for herself in her spare time, she provides a gentle, sympathetic view of residents in her town, seeking out simple scenes of beauty in suspended moments of rest or reverie, without concealing the poverty of daily life in post-war Europe.

Her works are full of light, making play with shadows and blurred areas, and above all illustrate her committed reconciliation with reality. The exhibition takes a fresh look at her rich and varied output, which goes well beyond the context of Humanist photography alone. This new interpretation of her work is achieved by comparing her personal archives with her own works and those of four contemporary artists — Viktoria Binschtok, Paul Graham, Lise Sarfati and Paola Yacoub –, who also worked on the theme of the street and the contemporary city. Their approaches are radically different, but echo the photographer’s in many ways.