Sabine Weiss, the photographer who loved people

That young woman who looks at the camera while holding her Rolleiflex to take a self-portrait, with a half smile, bangs and curious eyes is the photographer Sabine Weiss (Saint-Gingolph, Switzerland, 1924–Paris, 2021).

In that image from 1953, she shows in her gesture the security of someone who has managed to dedicate herself to what she wanted.

She before her was a girl who, stimulated by a mother who took her to museums and art galleries, had made the decision in her adolescence to dedicate herself to telling the world with her camera.

Weiss learned the trade in a studio in Geneva and left for the French capital when he was just 18 years old, in 1946. There he worked as an assistant to the fashion photographer Willy Maywald until Robert Doisneau —the author of the famous and prepared photo of

— noticed her work and introduced her to the prestigious Rapho photojournalism agency in 1952. It was the gateway to being able to travel around the world, portray figures from culture and the arts, and photograph people, especially children and older, on the streets of cities where he practiced his profession, especially in Paris.

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Sabine Weiss revisited

From this creative journey, which lasted for more than half a century, a hundred images can be seen until October 9 in Palafrugell (Girona), in the main exhibition of the 12th Xavier Miserachs Photography Biennial.

It is the first retrospective in Spain of whom Doisneau described as a “photographer of light and tenderness”.

'Self-Portrait' (1953). Sabine Weiss

Weiss, honored in 2021 at the Arles Meetings, the most important image art in Europe, then, at 97 years old, had the desire to attend the opening of her exhibition in Palafrugell, entitled

, on July 30, but passed away on December 28.

"It is an exhibition that was seen in France in 2011 and for which she herself had selected the images, all in black and white," says the director of the biennial, Maria Planas, at the venue that hosts it, La Bòbila, a old cork factory, reminder of a past in which this wood industry was very powerful in Palafrugell.

The biennial, which she invited to this newspaper, has been focused since her birth, in 1999, on documentary photography.

This edition is backed by the Palafrugell City Council, the Girona Provincial Council, the Government of Catalonia and the Banco Sabadell Foundation.

'Paris', France, 1955. Sabine Weiss

'Girl and tree'.

Spain, 1981. Sabine Weiss

'Bengal Light', Naples (Italy), 1955. Sabine Weiss

'Hungary', 1982. Sabine Weiss

'Young miner', Lens (France), 1955. Sabine Weiss

Photo of the painter and sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle, Paris (France), 1958.

'Self-Portrait' (1953). Sabine Weiss

'Woman on the subway', New York (United States), 1962. Sabine Weiss

'The Little Egyptian', 1983. Sabine Weiss

'Child', Toledo (Spain), 1949. Sabine Weiss

'Françoise Sagan', Paris (France), 1954. Sabine Weiss

'Terres au Curé Street', Paris (France), 1952. Sabine Weiss

“Sabine had been in love with her profession since she was a teenager,” continues Planas, referring to a woman who once humorously declared about this: “Do things you like, like photography, but also do things to earn a living. ”.

Weiss also felt love for humans.

In La Bòbila you can see that tenderness, his taste for capturing everyday street scenes, like young people kissing.

It is just one example of what the group of photographers she joined, that of the French humanists, wanted to convey, a label that she was not enthusiastic about, but in which she can be recognized, as the only woman, together with Doisneau, Édouard Boubat, Willy Ronis and Israëlis Bidermanas,

among others.

Everyone wanted to show, at the end of the 1940s, that there was hope in life, even among the ruins of World War II, an aspiration that the images of the Nazi death camps had made very difficult.

Weiss had that humanistic look when he photographed modest-looking elderly people or barefoot and dirty children in the street, always with dignity, sometimes smiling, without delving into misery, which would have been easy.

Among these images, the portrait of a miner boy from Lens stands out, the intense look of a beggar boy from Toledo, with a blackened face, or the one titled

, one of his favorites, also in Toledo, in 1954, in which four little ones, ragged, play while one of them holds in his mouth a stick to which a rope is tied, as if it were a rein.

“The only thing I have done is photograph what I bumped into on the street and that I liked”, summed up Weiss.

A visitor to the exhibition 'Observing life', dedicated to Sabine Weiss.David Borrat (EFE)

A few meters from the copies of children from different countries who jump, run, smoke and play, there is a gallery of portraits of cultural personalities whom he photographed, in some cases for

, where he worked in the fifties.

Later she would collaborate with the best publications in Europe and the United States,

,

,

,

... in fashion assignments, advertising and reports.

To this she added the opportunity to get closer to artists thanks to her marriage in 1950 with the painter Hugh Weiss (from whom she took her last name, hers was Weber).

Françoise Sagan posed before his lens with his typewriter, Samuel Beckett, Alberto Giacometti, Jeanne Moreau, Georges Bracque, Ella Fitzgerald, Ionesco with a surreal background of overturned chairs or André Breton, whom he placed on the left side of the image to show in the rest the

of his apartment cluttered with objects.

Since the mid-1950s, participation in collective and individual exhibitions has followed one another, along with the publication of books, practically until his death.

Today his work can be seen, among others, at the Georges Pompidou, the MoMa and the Met in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Kyoto Museum of Modern Art...

The final section of the exhibition is made up of snapshots in which games with shadows and reflections predominate, almost always at night, such as the one entitled

, from 1953, in which an individual is seen moving away quickly on a road paved and partially illuminated.

"That man who runs was her husband," explains Planas.

Also noteworthy is the façade of a two-storey restaurant in which the shadowy figures in each window tell different stories.

And, by way of farewell, two other shadows on the ground make up Weiss's self-portrait with her husband, a show of love from a photographer who brought her love for people to all of her work.

Bengal light, Naples (Italy), 1955. Sabine Weiss

A date with documentary photography

'La Guardia, Toledo', photograph taken by Català-Roca around 1960-61. CATALÀ-ROCA PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLECTION / HISTORICAL ARCHIVES OF THE COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTS OF CATALONIA

The Xavier Miserachs Biennial of Photography bears the name of this Barcelonan author because “in the 1970s he began to go to Palafrugell in the summers”, says Maria Planas, director of the event.

"He was very affable, he made friends, bought a house around here and when he died in 1998, those of us who knew him decided to honor him by organizing the biennial."

In this 12th edition, together with the exhibition by Sabine Weiss, one by Francesc Català-Roca at the Cork Museum, entitled

, in which, together with some copies of his classics, the original frames are exhibited, mainly in square format, that the author from Valls (Tarragona) took in the fifties and sixties, with doses of humor and irony.

In total, some 80 photos of women of all ages and in different situations, but above all working, from carrying water, to farm work, as stenographers... This is how this appointment is added to the celebrations of the centenary of a teacher of Spanish photography of the 20th century.

Another tone is offered by the images of women that Antoni Campañà portrayed, belonging to what is known as the “red box”, the set of photos that he had hidden because they dealt with the Civil War and that one of his grandchildren found in 2018 in his garage.

"Campañà worked on both sides of the conflict, without taking sides with either," says Planas. In the Municipal Theater of Palafrugell, in an exercise in comparison, militia women can be seen at the beginning of the conflict and Falangists at the end, all in Barcelona, each wrapped in flags, and in similar gestures and attitudes, with some unpublished pieces.The biennial completes its offer with talks, debates and projections.

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