Ilse Bing Artwork valuations, appraisals and auction estimates

lse Bing was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1899 and received a solid artistic and intellectual education, studying mathematics, physics and art history at the University of Frankfurt. After defending a doctorate in art history, she began her career as a photographer. Read the full biography

lse Bing was born in Frankfurt am Main in 1899 and received a solid artistic and intellectual education, studying mathematics, physics and art history at the University of Frankfurt. After defending a doctorate in art history, she began her career as a photographer. He started with a self-portrait taken with a Kodak box at the age of 14 and in 1929 he purchased his first Leica, the 24x36mm camera marketed by Leitz that revolutionized the world of photography. This camera would become his tool of photographic expression for the next 20 years. In 1929, during a university trip to Switzerland, he experimented with the possibilities of his Leica and began to explore his expressive capabilities. His photographic expression was influenced by his joining the Parisian surrealist scene in the 1930s, following his creative experiences in the avant-garde climate in his native Frankfurt. He acted with broad photographic visions: photojournalism, architecture, advertising and fashion, declining bold shots and applying courageous perspectives. Her reputation as a professional photographer was underlined by the critics of the time, who highlighted the delicate relationship between technique and creativity. His most famous and replicated photograph is the 1931 "Self-Portrait with Leica", which has become an icon of his photographic career. Ilse Bing was defined as the "Queen of the Leica" in Paris on the occasion of the Twenty-ninth Salon International d'art photographique in 1934. She adopted a small photographic format, in a period in which large plates reigned supreme, characterizing the explicit personality of the his photograph. Ilse Bing's photography underlined the singularity and specificity of the subjects depicted thanks to the use of the enlargement of the Leica 24x36mm frame. He experimented in the darkroom, starting from the solarization of negatives, with autonomous and independent procedures from those of Man Ray and Lee Miller. She stopped working in 1993 due to a car accident and in 1998 she died in New York.