See It Now: Bing and Morath, Two Women and Many Styles

American Photography
By David Schonauer

She was not a fashion photographer.

But Inge Morath, one of the two first female Magnum photographers, had an eye for style. “Whether photographing festivals or artists’ studios, on films sets, the street, or the fashion runway, what distinguishes Morath’s photography is an unerring eye for life’s brilliant theatricality,” writes Smithsonian American Art Museum curator John P. Jacob in the new book Inge Morath: On Style.

The book is the result of five years of work in which images from Morath’s archive that fell into the broad theme of style were culled. Most of the new collection comes from the early years of her career, in England, France and the United States in the 1950s and 1960s, notes the New York Times. It’s a fresh way of looking at Morath’s view of the world.

Rather than clothing, the book concerns itself with “demeanor and expression of self,” writes Jacob, the book’s editor. “More precisely, it is concerned with the social relations of appearance.”

Meanwhile, the work of another pioneering woman photographer, Ilse Bing, is featured in the exhibition “Live and Life Will Give You Pictures: Masterworks of French Photography 1890-1950” at the Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia through January 9, 2017. As the AnOther blog notes, Bing was an artist of many styles.

Today we spotlight both photographers.

While photographers like Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man Ray and Brassaï are widely credited with establishing Paris as the centre of modern photography in the 1930s, Bing, a German who also resided in the city at that time, is more frequently overlooked, writes Daisy Woodward, who calls Bing “a creative sponge, admiring and borrowing from a variety of contemporary movements – from modernist 'New Photography' to German 'New Objectivity'; from the work of Alfred Stieglitz and American social realism to Surrealism and the Bauhaus.”

Yet she managed to maintain her own unique style.

“Her work boasts a distinct dynamism thanks to her frequent employment of unusual angles, cropped compositions and aerial views (she is said to have turned her photographs upside-down and sideways, agonizing over their compositional relationships),” writes Woodward.

Bing was part of the photographic milieu of Paris in the ’30s, where, notes the Edwynn Houk Gallery, she came to be known as “Queen of the Leica” for her influential mastery of the hand-held camera that revolutionized the medium in the period. Born into a Jewish family in Frankfurt, Bing abandoned an academic career to devote herself to photography. Throughout the ’30s she shot everything from photojournalism to portraiture and advertising. She also shot fashion for Harper’s Bazaar. Fleeing the war, she emigrated to New York in 1941. She retired from photography in 1959, but her work was rediscovered in the late 1970s.

One of her best known pictures is a complex self-portrait made with mirrors reflecting her own face and her beloved Leica. “The double presence of the artist at work, and the intentness of her gaze, serves to highlight the newfound independence that women were enjoying at the time, while the prominent inclusion of the camera symbolizes the burgeoning technical revolution of the period,” notes Woodward.

Morath was born in Austria in 1923 and grew up in Germany during World War II. After the war she became a journalist and translator in Munich and Vienna, and by 1949 she was working with the photographer Ernst Haas. (See our series on Haas.) Magnum co-founder Robert Capa took note of their work and invited them to Paris. There, Morath joined the agency as a writer and researcher for Cartier-Bresson. By 1955 she had become a photographer in her own right and a Magnum member.

In the 1950s, Morath and Eve Arnold were the only female members of Magnum. That fact, notes Jacob, may explain why Morath was sent to photograph subjects like debutantes and dog shows.

“But eventually Morath chose those subjects willingly, and she covered them with sophistication, creating images of models, beauty schools, and balls,” noted Slate in September. Such stories explored the “social relations of appearance” and made “self-reflexive statements about photography itself and the photographic construction of beauty,” writes Jacob.

In the forward of Inge Morath: On Style, Justine Picardie, the editor in chief of the British editions of Harper’s Bazaar and Town & Country, writes that Morath was uniquely able to explore “the relationship between polished veneers and what lies beneath.”

Morath’s daughter, the writer and director Rebecca Miller, tells the New York Times that her mother’s “attitude toward beautiful things” came from “having had nothing for a period of time.”

“It’s a certain kind of appreciation of lovely things that she had that was particular to her time,” Miller says.