Skyscrapers (Wall Street)

Ilse Bing abandoned her native Frankfurt and her studies in art history to become a photographer in Paris, where she spent most of the 1930s. She began providing the burgeoning French picture press with fashion and social documentary photographs, becoming so proficient with her small, unobtrusive Leica camera that she eventually became known as the “Queen of the Leica.” The noted New York dealer Julien Levy introduced Bing’s work, including several views of Paris, to an American audience in a landmark 1932 exhibition, Modern European Photography: Twenty Photographers. Bing made this image of New York’s cavernous Wall Street area during a visit to the city in 1936. Five years later, in 1941, after being jailed by the Vichy government and sent to a French internment camp, Bing would flee her beloved Paris, occupied at the time by the Nazis, and emigrate to New York.