Finding virtue in Weiss

By Sarah Moroz

The photographer Sabine Weiss has been living in the same house in the 16th arrondissement of Paris for nearly seven decades. When she moved in with her husband in 1949, the water tap was located in the courtyard; today, the house is filled with books, foreign curios and treasures found at the marché aux puces, or flea markets. “I bought things to save them from destruction,” she says. “Things that would have disappeared, things with no purpose, that people would have thrown out.”

Weiss has always had an eye for the overlooked. The fruits of this preoccupation can now be viewed at two exhibitions in France. The Jeu de Paume in Tours showcases her range, from her pictures of French celebrities and street children from the 1950s – her most prolific period – to her studies of local communities in India, Bulgaria and Guadeloupe, where she went travelling in the 1980s. Les Douches La Galerie in Paris emphasises the cinematic aspect of Weiss’s work. The best example is an image she snapped in Montmartre in 1953: the composition’s multiple windows double as small screens. Within the illuminated rectangles, a pair of lovers kiss, below a sign that reads “Noces” (nuptials).