LAUSANNE.- Photo Elysée is presenting an exhibition in homage to the photographer who died in 2021, and has invited artist Nathalie Boutté (France, 1967) to create a dialogue with her photographs. Sabine Weiss explored every aspect of her profession over more than sixty years, working in turn as a portrait, fashion, advertising and street photographer as well as a photojournalist for numerous international magazines. Along with Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Edouard Boubat, Brassaï and Izis, Weiss contributed to the French humanist photography movement and was one of the few female photographers to make a living from her art from the 1950s onwards. “To be powerful, a photograph must speak to us about some aspect of the human condition, making us feel the emotion the photographer experienced in front of his or her subject” she wrote.

Unlike Sabine Weiss who built up her body of work by photographing the street or fulfilling orders in her studio, Nathalie Boutté does not take photographs but meticulously cuts strips of paper on which she prints a text. She then recomposes the images from which she drew her inspiration by assembling the strips of paper to recreate the work in volume. The images, made of strips that create shades of grey when there is text – in this case quotations from Sabine Weiss – gradually come into focus as you move away from them.

The show presents a selection of the photographer’s iconic works and reveals various treasures among the countless negatives, prints and contact sheets that make up her archives. In 2017, conscious of the importance of preserving her work, Weiss chose Photo Elysée to conserve her archive collection, which was transferred to the museum's Plateforme 10 repository in early 2024.

Sabine Weiss

Born Sabine Weber in 1924, the Swiss photographer trained under Paul Boissonnas in Geneva before moving to Paris in 1946, where she spent four years working as an assistant to the photographer Willy Maywald. Settled in the French capital with her husband Hugh Weiss, an American painter, she was associated with the agency Rapho for many years.

Sabine Weiss gained recognition in the United States and Europe in the 1950s with the publication of her work in well-known magazines as well as by taking part in major exhibitions (including Post-War European Photography at the MoMA in 1953, a solo exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1954, and The Family of Man in 1955).

However, it wasn’t until the late 1970s, with a retrospective in Arras, requests from publishers for monographs and the public's enthusiasm for 1950s photography, that she rediscovered and resumed her early work in black and white. Several events and books, including a retrospective at the Château de Tours in 2016 and the show at the Centre Pompidou in 2018, prove that the reappraisal of her archives and work has only just begun. In 2020, the Women in Motion Prize awarded by Kering and Les Rencontres d'Arles in recognition of a unique career, followed by a retrospective at Les Rencontres d'Arles in 2021, have finally given Sabine Weiss the recognition she deserves.