Skyscrapers (Wall Street)

Photography and Media

1936

Ilse Bing
American, born Germany, 1899–1998

Ilse Bing abandoned her native Frankfurt and her studies in art history to become a photographer in Paris, where she spent most of the 1930s. She began providing the burgeoning French picture press with fashion and social documentary photographs, becoming so proficient with her small, unobtrusive Leica camera that she eventually became known as the “Queen of the Leica.” The noted New York dealer Julien Levy introduced Bing’s work, including several views of Paris, to an American audience in a landmark 1932 exhibition, Modern European Photography: Twenty Photographers. Bing made this image of New York’s cavernous Wall Street area during a visit to the city in 1936. Five years later, in 1941, after being jailed by the Vichy government and sent to a French internment camp, Bing would flee her beloved Paris, occupied at the time by the Nazis, and emigrate to New York.

Status: Currently Off View
Department: Photography and Media

Artist: Ilse Bing
Title: Skyscrapers (Wall Street)
Place: United States (Artist's nationality:)
Date Dates are not always precisely known, but the Art Institute strives to present this information as consistently and legibly as possible. Dates may be represented as a range that spans decades, centuries, dynasties, or periods and may include qualifiers such as c. (circa) or BCE.: Made 1936
Medium: Gelatin silver print
Dimensions: Image/paper: 28.2 × 19 cm (11 1/8 × 7 1/2 in.)
Credit Line: Gift of Nicholas and Susan Pritzker
Reference Number: 2012.779

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