Sabine Weiss: The Poetry of the Instant

The Casa dei Tre Oci celebrates the Franco-Swiss photographer Sabine Weiss, who passed away at the age of 97 on 28 December 2021. The exhibition, curated by Virginie Chardin, is her largest retrospective ever held, and gathers together more than 200 photographs. Her lifelong work embraces a wide range of subjects and genres, from reportage to artists’ portraits, from fashion to street photography. Elegant and intimate, Weiss’ portraits are able to capture the life moving inside its subjects.

Since Weiss and her husband – the American painter Hugh Weiss – were very close to renowned artists, a section of the exhibition is dedicated to her portraits of painters, sculptors, actors, and musicians such as Robert Rauschenberg, Françoise Sagan, Romy Schneider, Ella Fitzgerald, Simone Signoret, and Brigitte Bardot.

The exhibition also features a series of photographs that the artist took for Vogue during the ’50s, collaborating with photographers such as William Klein, Henry Clarke, and Guy Bourdin.

A turning point in her work was her voyage to America in 1955, where she took some iconic shots of the streets of New York, published in The New York Times in a major spread entitled “A Parisienne’s New Yorkers”. Many of these shoots are exhibited for the first time in Italy. The exhibition also includes works created in the 1980s, when the artist was in her sixties, during her travels to Portugal, India, Myanmar, Bulgaria, and Egypt.