Photography Collection

Auction House Millon-Cornette de Saint Cyr will hold an auction of more than 500 photographs by Ilse Bing acquired by the current collector directly from the Ilse Bing Estate. Vintage exhibition prints, drawings, documents and other manuscript material are included in the auction, which will be held in Paris at Drouot Montaigne, 15 avenue Montaigne 75008 Paris on November 16, 2009, 7 pm (local time). The phone and fax during viewing: phone: +33 148 00 20 91 and fax: +33 148 00 20 83. The sale can be viewed November 14-15, from 11 am to 6 pm, and November 16, from 11 to 12 am, at Drouot Montaigne. You can also preview by appointment with the expert Christophe Goeury.

Ilse Bing (1899 – 1998) was a German avant-garde and commercial photographer who produced pioneering monochrome images during the inter-war era. Her move from Frankfurt to the burgeoning avant-garde and surrealist scene in Paris in 1930 marked the start of the most notable period of her career. Producing images in the fields of photojournalism, architectural photography, advertising and fashion, her work was published in magazines such as Le Monde Illustre, Harper's Bazaar, and Vogue. Respected for her use daring perspectives and cropping, use of natural light and geometries, she also discovered a type of solarisation for negatives independently of a similar process developed by the artist Man Ray. Her rapid success as a photographer and her position of being the only professional in Paris to use an advanced Leica camera earned her the title "Queen of the Leica" from the critic and photographer Emmanuel Sougez. In 1936 her work was included in the first modern photography exhibition held at the Louvre, and in 1937 she travelled to New York where her images were included in the exhibition "Photography 1839–1937" at the Museum of Modern Art.