It was by chance that he discovered what would be the great vocation of his life.
A student of Mathematics and Physics, driven by a family that loved science, and of Art History, perhaps influenced by a Van Gogh whose work she had discovered on a trip to Switzerland, she began taking photos with the sole purpose of documenting her Practical jobs.
Until he understood that the thing was the other way around: his true passion came from the hand of that little camera with which he could reflect the world.
At the age of 30 he decided to abandon his studies and the Germany in which he had been born in 1899 to settle in Paris.
Self-taught, everything interested him: still lifes, city life, fashion, portraits, architecture, dance.
And to all of him he gave a particular look, a novel angle.
Her enormous talent, and her working instrument, earned her the nickname that has stayed with her ever since: for the rest of her days Ilse Bing was known as “the queen of the Leica”.
It is not clear which of the established artists of that time was the architect of that baptism, if Cartier Bres
They are, Sougez or Man Ray, who greatly influenced her from surrealism.
There is no doubt that she, from very early on, became an undisputed benchmark of modern photography.
“I felt like the camera was growing like
an
extension of my eyes, and it was moving with me,” he said.
Married to the pianist Konrad Wolff, the arrival of Nazism pushed them into exile in 1941. Their destination was the United States;
the high cost of customs duties there forced her to discard much of her work.
In time, postwar New York would become one of her camera targets.
That camera that he wielded like a weapon until, in 1959, he decided perhaps that a cycle had come to an end and he filed away his Leica.
With the same talent he then concentrated on collages, line drawings and poetry;
he called his poems "snapshots without a camera."
He continued to dedicate himself to them until the end of his days, in Manhattan, shortly after his 99th birthday.
