Photographer Sabine Weiss is dead: representative of »humanistic photography«

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Photographer Sabine Weiss in her Parisian studio 2014: A good photo has to be »touching, well composed and simple«

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MIGUEL MEDINA / AFP

The well-known Swiss-French photographer Sabine Weiss is dead. As her family announced on Wednesday, she died at the age of 97 at her home in Paris.

For almost eight decades, Weiss captured social change in her pictures.

She was considered the last representative of the French school of humanistic photography, to which Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis and Brassaï also belonged.

Weiss was born in Switzerland in 1924.

She bought her first camera at the age of twelve and began an apprenticeship in a renowned Geneva photo studio at the age of 16.

In 1946 she settled in Paris, and in 1995 she took French citizenship.

Weiss began to document the living conditions of ordinary people early on. Her first job after arriving in Paris was with the fashion photographer Willy Maywald. The pioneer of post-war photography was also known for her fashion photos in Vogue and for her portrait photos, including the composers Benjamin Britten and Igor Stravinsky. She also photographed Romy Schneider and Françoise Sagan for their artist portraits. In addition to »Vogue«, her customers also included »Newsweek«, »Time«, »Life«, »Esquire« and »Paris Match«.

"From the beginning I had to make a living from photography, it was nothing artistic," the artist once said in an interview in 2014.

"It was a craft, I was a photo-craftsman."

At the same time, however, she also said that a good photo must "be touching, well composed and simple".

The feelings of the protagonists should "catch the eye".

Her works have been shown in around 160 exhibitions worldwide and hang in the permanent collections of major museums - including the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Center Pompidou in Paris.

It was with great pleasure that Weiss attended a retrospective of her work in the Museon Arlaten in Arles in July.

Mainly street scenes such as portraits of begging children were shown.

Her photos can be seen in Venice from March - according to her team, they are an "homage" to her work.

"I've done everything in photography," Sabine Weiss told the AFP news agency last year.

"I've been to morgues and factories, I've photographed rich people, and I've photographed fashion," she said.

"But what remains are the pictures that I took for myself, in quiet, secret moments."

xvc / AFP