“I take photographs to hold on to the ephemeral, capture chance, to keep an image of something that will disappear, gestures, attitudes, objects that are reminders of our brief lives. The camera picks them up and freezes them at the moment that they disappear.”
~ Sabine Weiss
(1924-2021)
A great example of chance in life: a busy street, bustling with activity. Café society in full swing in the foreground, and on a second floor, a stolen kiss—a story within a story. Eternal Paris captured in a single instant.
Sabine Weiss, the artist behind this image, was born in Switzerland in 1924. In 1942, unsure of her path in life, she chose to follow her passion: photography. Her mother introduced her to art galleries and Roman churches at a young age, while her father, a researcher and chemist, encouraged her early experiments in printing photos with the resources available at the time. From 1942 to 1945, Weiss apprenticed at Boissonnas in Geneva, a celebrated dynasty of photographers.
In 1945, she established her own studio in Geneva, but in 1946 she made the decisive move to Paris, knowing there was no turning back. She asked Willy Maywald to become her assistant, and in 1949, she met painter Hugh Weiss, with whom she would share her life. In Paris, Weiss honed her craft across fashion, photojournalism, advertising, and street photography, capturing life with a humanist eye.
Come see this photograph, along with many other remarkable works, in our exhibition Nouvelle Vague: French Photography from the 1950s and 1960s, now on view.
