All language subtitles for Sabine Weiss

There's a photograph of
a man, frozen, mid-stride,

chasing his own shadow
through a cobbled Paris street.

The photographer who
made that image spent more

than seven decades photographing
the people around her.

Children, beggars,
movie stars, sculptors,

strangers on the street, with
the same unhurried respect.

She was there before Cartier
Brisson published his first book.

She was still working
after every one of her

great contemporaries had put
down their cameras for good.

She once said photography was not art.

It was a craft.

Hers, though, would end up
hanging in the museum of modern

art, the center pumpy dew, and
the metropolitan museum of art.

The last living witness of a
movement that taught the world

to look at ordinary life and
see something worth keeping.

Bonjour!

The sweet, sub-invise,
it's your sweet photograph.

This is her story.

Photographic inspiration
presents Meet the Master Series.

Sabine Weiss.

We celebrate timeless photographic art,
distinguishing it from transient trends.

Maureen Weiss, born Sabine Weber, came into
the world on January 23rd, 1924, in St.

Jingulf, a small village on
the Swiss French border.

Her mother took her often
to galleries and old churches.

At 12 years old, Sabine bought a bake-a-light
camera with her own pocket money.

She made her own
contact prints holding a

negative against light-sensitive paper
until the sun slowly brought the image out.

I realized very young
that photography would

be my means of
expression, she said later.

I was more visual than intellectual,
I was not very good at studying.

She left school, she left home.

As she put it herself,
she got on a bicycle one

summer day and simply
rode away from her old life.

In 1942 and 1945, she
apprenticed under Paul

Boysenos in Geneva, a photography house
with 80 years of family history behind it.

It gave her the discipline
of the dark room

and a Calvinist instinct for
simplicity that never left her work.

In 1946, Sabine left Geneva for Paris.

She would later describe the city's
mood in those years with real tenderness.

It was a beautiful period.

We were between
the end of the German

occupation and the
beginning of Americanization.

Paul had come out of a terrible ordeal
and thought they could rebuild everything.

She found work as an
assistant to Willy Maywald,

a German-born fashion
photographer, learning

studio lighting and
composition from the inside.

Her own first photo
report had already been

published the year before
when she was just 21.

In 1949, on a trip to Italy, she met an
American painter named Hugh Weiss.

They married on September 23, 1950,
and later adopted a daughter, Marion.

That same year,
Sabine opened her own

independent studio, free at
last, to work on her own terms.

She was by then roaming Paris
with a camera at every free hour.

The markets, the bestros, the vacant
lots near her apartment at the port to St.

Clue were local children
played among the rubble.

Nobody had assigned her to photograph them.

She simply couldn't stop.

In 1952, Robert Duano,
already one of the most

respected photographers
in France, noticed

Sabine's work and personally
recommended her to the Raffo photo agency.

It was, in some ways,
an unlikely door opening.

Two journalism in the 1950s
was an overwhelmingly male trade.

She sighed with Vogue
as a fashion and portrait

photographer, and her
repotage began appearing

in lifetime, Newsweek,
and Paris match.

In 1954, the legendary
curator, Edward Steichen,

selected three of her
photographs, including

a portrait of a child
holding a sparkler for what

would become one of the
most famous photography

exhibitions ever staged, The Family of Man,
which opened at MoMA in New York in 1955.

She was 30 years old, self-taught, and
standing in the same rooms as the Giants of

20th century photography.

Ask Sabine Weiss what she was
doing, and she would correct you gently.

From the start, I had to make
a living from photography.

It wasn't something artistic.

She told AFP in 2014.

It was a craft.

I was a craftswoman of photography.

It's a striking claim
from a woman whose

prints now sell it auction
and hang in national

museums, but it explains
everything about how she worked.

She didn't theorize.

She didn't wait for the perfect
composition to arrange itself.

All the pictures I take are
entirely instant, she said.

What I like is to make an instant picture.

I never wait.

Her approach was intuitive,
immediate, and deeply human.

She described her relationship to
her subjects almost like a conversation.

I love this constant
dialogue between myself,

my camera, and my
subject, which is what

differentiates me from
certain other photographers

who don't seek this dialogue
and prefer to distance themselves.

For Sabine, the camera
was an extension of

her own curiosity, a way of joining the
world, not observing it from a distance.

She once described it in her own words as
an alibi, a pretext for seeing everything,

for going everywhere, for
communicating with everyone.

And yet beneath the modesty,
there was a clear aesthetic conviction.

A good picture must move you, she insisted,
have a good composition, and be sober.

Simplicity was not a limitation.

It was the whole point.

It should be simple, she
said, and it should move you.

French photographer and
filmmaker, Raymond de

Pardon, reflecting on
her work after her death,

identified exactly what set
her apart from her male peers.

I detected in her not only compassion, but
also a tenderness and a gentleness that men

didn't have.

Two photographers of
her generation moved as

fluidly between worlds
as Sabine Weiss did.

On magazine assignment,
she photographed

fashion for Vogue and traveled internationally
on reportage for life and Paris match.

In the studio, and
increasingly by reputational

loan, she became a
sought after portraitist

of the era's great creative minds.

But it was her personal
work, made for no

client, no assignment,
no paycheck that would

define her legacy.

Wandering her own
neighborhood with her camera,

she photographed
the snotty-nosed kids as

she called them, the beggars,
the small piss-takers of the street.

These images had no
commercial purpose, the

existed purely because
she couldn't look away.

That personal work placed her, almost
without her noticing, inside a movement.

It never occurred to
me that what I was doing

was humanist photography, she
admitted to the French newspaper La Qua.

At a long side, Robert
Duano, Willie Ronis,

Eduard Buba, Isis, and
Brosy, she became one

of the defining figures of
French humanist photography.

A school built on
sympathy, dignity, and an

unshakeable belief that the everyday
deserve to be looked at closely.

By the time the last
of her peers had died,

Sabine Weiss was the
movement's final living voice.

For decades, Sabine Weiss
worked largely outside

the spotlight given
to her male colleagues.

That began to change late in her long life.

In 2008, the Maison
European de la photograph

in Paris gave her a
major retrospective.

In 2016, the Jeux de
Poem followed with an

exhibition that introduced
her to a new generation.

In 2018, the Saint-Répompadeux
staged Sabine

Weiss, the city's,
the street, the other.

In 2020, caring and the
wrong country de aro

awarded her the Women
in Motion Award for

photography, recognition
finally on her own terms.

A year later, in 2021, aro honored
her again with a career retrospective.

She died in her Paris home on December 28,
2021, at the age of 97, having photographed

by her own estate's count
across roughly 160,000

negatives and tens
of thousands of prints

and slides, now preserved at the
photo-elizé museum in Lausanne.

She never called herself an artist.

She called herself a craftswoman
who happened to love people.

Sabine Weiss, the last
humanist, and one of

photography's great,
quiet observers of us all.