Original subtitles

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.