Sabine Weiss

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From Arles to Maison Lacroix

Photographing clothes

The window displays of
Printemps department store
in the 1950s. © Sabine
Weiss/ Agence Rapho

Still life at Vogue

Fashion publishing

Photographer of fashion shows: Guy Marineau

Clothes in motion

From the street to the blog

Sabine Weiss

Sabine Weiss_Switzerland
Born in 1924 in Saint-Gingolph, Switzerland. Lives in Paris.

‘While browsing a shelf of traditional photo-journalism, I came across the treasures of these department-store window displays, of childhood through the seasons. Who has never imagined that the dummies come alive at night and have a ball?'
Christian Lacroix

The window displays of Printemps department stores in the 1950s. The 1950s were happy times indeed.
We lived frugally. We walked around, and in each quarter discovered characters with unconventional attitudes.
Yet naturally I had to find photographs to take – I was established in my profession – and to make a living from them.
One day, the Printemps department-store chain asked me to photograph all their window displays every time the seasons changed. Although I found the work devoid of interest, it challenged me to work fast.
The method was quickly devised. I photographed at night to avoid reflections in the glass – at a rate of sixty an hour! – while my husband chatted with the boulevard prostitutes. For one of the display backdrops, I had photographed the chairs in the Tuileries Gardens, and when I wanted to photograph the window display, a tramp fell asleep in front of it…
I didn’t think that, fifty years later, I would be looking again at these rolls of shots, which were cluttering up the place in two shoeboxes.
It was a request from the museum in Barcelona, which was preparing an exhibition on the 1950s, that caused me to discover what was, at least, an amusing document. The windows displayed gloves, fridges on stands, girl communicants, aprons and seasonal fashions.
Whereas I find that the photographs in my books are timeless, these breadwinning shots clearly show that in the space of half a century, everything has changed.

Sabine Weiss, 2008.

Exhibition curator: Olivier Saillard.
Prints produced by TOROSLAB (Hervé Hudry).
Exhibition presented at the Espace Van Gogh.

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