Ilse Bing was born in 1899 in Frankfurt, Germany to a wealthy Jewish family. She was well-educated, especially when it came to the arts and music. In 1920, Bing enrolled at the University of Frankfurt to study math and physics, but eventually changed course and moved to Vienna to study art history. In 1924, she began a doctoral program to study architecture. It was during her time as a doctoral student that she began photographing buildings for her thesis and purchased her first camera. This allowed Bing to develop her lifelong interest in photography. After buying her Leica camera the following year, she gave up her art history career to devote herself full-time to photography. She began as a freelance photojournalist for the Frankfurt newspaper. She became inspired by the work of photographer Florence Henri and architect Martin Stam. Ilse then moved to Paris to work with Henri and other Modernists and explore techniques of modernist photography Alongside her fellow-photographers Brassaï, Man Ray, Florence Henri, and Dora Maar, she contributed to making Paris the capital of photography in the 1930s.
Her photograph, Self-Portrait With Leica (1931), became one of her most famous works for its symbolic interpretation. In the photo, Bing designates herself as the central figure of the historic moment that the 1930s were for photography, and makes the Leica a character in the work as well. This camera was a portable and lightweight device and became a symbol of modernism. Because of its user-friendliness, it became an extension of the human eye. It captured images in the flow of real life and became a way of breaking the boundary between dreams and reality. Her photographs during her times in Paris are also marked by a strong dreamlike quality. From the dancers she photographed at the Moulin-Rouge to the performers she saw, there was poetry found in the small details she encountered.
Her success landed her at the forefront of the city’s avant-garde style of photography. She loved the romanticism, symbolism and dream-like imagery of surrealism and incorporated that into her personal style. Bing saw the beauty in subjects others did not notice. Because of her love for math and science, she found the two always inspiring her work. She focused her attention on materials, surfaces, architectural spaces, nuances of movement, and texture.
In 1940, Ilse Bing and her husband, musicologist and pianist Konrad Wolff, left Paris due to the tensions of World War II and were detained at the Pyrenean concentration camp of Gurs while waiting for an American visa. After reuniting, they fled to New York in 1941 and she resumed her work as a photographer. But the start of her second career proved difficult and she was faced with many financial troubles.
In 1959, Bing stopped photographing for she believed she had said everything she wanted to say with a camera. She then began writing poetry and drawing, publishing two books, Words as Vision (1974) and Numbers in Images (1976). Her work was forgotten for almost two decades, and was later rediscovered in the late 1970s, when photography became recognized internationally. In 1982, she published her first book of photographs, Femmes de l’enfance à la vieillesse (Women from the Cradle to Old Age). Her work can be found in many major public collections including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago. She died in 1998 at the age of 98 years old.