The Chosen Moment: Selected Writings of Ilse Bing
ABOUT THIS BOOK
Discover the unpublished writings of pioneering photographer Ilse Bing and explore her powerful reflections on photography, memory, exile, and modern life.
The Chosen Moment presents a remarkable trove of unpublished writings by Ilse Bing (1899–1998), the innovative German Jewish photographer. Written between the 1950s and 1990, these texts combine memoir, reflection, and theory, tracing Bing’s journey from Frankfurt to Paris to New York amid a backdrop of technological innovation, women’s increasing professional achievement, European cultural collapse, Jewish persecution, and the anxieties of the atomic age.
Featuring an introduction contextualizing Bing’s biography and artistic practice, as well as more than 50 illustrations, this volume restores Bing’s voice through her own words, reinscribing her in the history she helped shape.
- Explores Bing’s ideas around vision, time, memory, and chance.
- Presents Bing’s concept of “the chosen moment” in photography and places her in dialogue with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s influential “decisive moment.”
- Positions her within key modernist and critical traditions while grounding her work in the Jewish experience, World War II, and women’s roles in photographic history.
Reconsider the history of modern photography and encounter a singular artist, thinker, and witness in this important anthology.