LoosenArt Mag / Gallery

Ilse Bing. Self-Portrait

Posted on February 04 2025

 

 

 

Author Marco Belpoliti
Translator David Sommers
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Ilse Bing was thirty-two years old when she took this photograph.  If it is true that she bought her first photo camera in 1928, she had started taking pictures three years prior. Then in 1929, the year of the New York stock exchange crash, she acquired a small portable 35mm Leica camera, with which she took many of her pictures. I have read in some biographies that at the age of fourteen Ilse had already taken a self-portrait thanks to a Kodak received as a gift from her wealthy family engaged in trade in Frankfurt. 1931 marked the end of her first magazine collaboration and the beginning of her contact with the German intellectual environment—architects, artists, and poets—where she met surrealists and dadaists, who were ten years her senior. This photograph, entitled “Self-portrait with Leica,” is now in the catalogue that is on view at an exhibition still open in Rome at the Baths of Caracalla: Narciso the photograph at the mirror (edited by Nunzio Giustozzi, Electa).

I do not know if this image is attributable to the reflection game of the young hunter of the Greek myth. It would rather seem to me as the image of a double shot: an image that intends to experimentally verify the dual nature of the photographic shot. She wants to look into how one may see from two different points of view at the same time. One is that of the photographer, who looks through the camera and is simultaneously observing the subject of his shot: she wants to see; she looks at herself and looks at us. The other corresponds to being seen while taking the photograph, from the side: she is being observed while observing. Impersonality is almost a must with the second image. In addition, the first one is almost hidden on the right side of the photograph: both the camera and the head are partly outside the sensitive paper frame. Which of the two is the true self-portrait? The one on the left side or the one on the right side? One could say: both. But that might not be true.

The only self-portrait is the cut one, on the right. Since I can’t do Ilse Bing’s experiment with mirrors myself - how the hell did she arrange to get this separation of points of view in the set up in her room at the Hotel de Londres in Paris? - , I am forced to assume that the profile is a portrait and not a self-portrait, even if it’s her capturing herself. Are we facing a doubling? I don’t think so. The two images are separate and not joined. They are divided and not connected. This is because of the point of view. Yet Ilse Bing, who was in touch with the artistic avant-gardes of the early decades of the twentieth century, knew well what the Double was. However, hers is never experimental photography, but photography that experiments. It’s photography without theory, but not of the naive kind; quite the opposite actually. Maybe we could call it a practical photography? She tries to gather other points of view, as you can see from the photographs that she left us, the ones that she managed to bring to America while fleeing from the Nazis who had imprisoned her in a camp in France.

Her most famous photographs - she had been virtually forgotten for quite a long time, as many female photographers have been- reveal a sharp look, as is seen in this “Self-portrait with Leica”: an almost endless fence, dancing bodies , hands leafing through a diary, children with animals, pipes, twisted trees, etc. Anything one can look at intensely around themselves, and sometimes even farther away than that. Sharp look means: acute, intense, penetrating, perceptive; this look can even pierce. This double image - front and side - also shares the same sharpness. One can see it from the eye on the right, the one that emerges from behind the small Leica resting on the tripod.

One solitary eye looks at us as if it were the eye of a Cyclops. The other is the lens that stares at the image it portrays. An eye on herself - the self-portrait - and an eye on us: she is looking at us. But, wasn’t she looking at herself? Sure, she is looking at herself; but, as any photographer who respects their craft, she is looking at us while shooting. Does she judge us? I don’t think so. If anything, she is taking some measurements. Isn’t that what one does when they take pictures? Ilse Bing looks at us from a distance. Such is, according to critics, the meaning of her photography: establishing a difference, visually feeding it. But that’s exactly how photography puts different things in contact. Perhaps we could say that the meaning behind Ilse Bing’s photography is to use a different eye every time.

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Ilse Bing, Self-Portrait - Leica, © Estate of Ilse Bing
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