Ilse Bing and "Image Cities" by Anastasia Samoylova, new exhibitions at the KBr photography center of the Mapfre Foundation

Fundación Mapfre has presented the exhibitions Ilse Bing and Anastasia Samoylova. Image Cities, which can be visited until May 14 at the KBr photography center.

Ilse Bing belonged to a generation of photographers who, for the first time, achieved some visibility in the world of arts and culture, among which were Germaine Krull, Florence Henri, Laure Albin-Guillot, Madame d'Ora, Berenice Abbott - to whom Fundación MAPFRE dedicated an exhibition in 2019 -, Nora Dumas and Gisèle Freund.

The Ilse Bing exhibition consists of 190 photographs, in addition to documentary material, and is structured around ten sections: Discovering the world through a camera: the beginnings; The bustle of the street: the French years; The life of still lifes; Lights and shadows of modern architecture; The seduction of fashion; The United States in two stages; Portrait of time; The danced body and its circumstances; Nature alive; and Revelations of self-image, which take a chronological and thematic tour of the artist's career.

As a novelty, in Barcelona, four photographs from the collections of the Musée Carnavalet (Paris) are exhibited and the film Drei Fotografinnen: Ilse Bing, a documentary made five years before her death, is shown in the room under the direction of Antonia Lerch. The film shows an already very frail Ilse Bing, who moves with difficulty in the narrowness of her modest apartment, but with the ability to evoke with full lucidity her life and her work. A thrilling testimony to the deep vitality and creative drive that make Bing's images seminal works of photography in the first half of the 20th century.

Ilse Bing (Frankfurt, 1899 – New York, 1998) was born into a wealthy Jewish family. In 1929, he discovered his photographic vocation when he began taking photographs to illustrate his art history thesis, which he decided to leave behind to devote himself exclusively to photography, for the next thirty years, in an exciting artistic and life trajectory.

In 1930, he moved to Paris, where he combined his dedication to photojournalism with other photographic projects of a personal nature, which, in a very short time, allowed him to become one of the main representatives of the renewing tendencies of the photography that arose in the cultural effervescence of Paris in those years. Faced with the advance of Nazism, in 1941 she went into exile in New York together with her husband, the pianist Konrad Wolff. Two decades later, at the age of sixty, she left her work as a photographer and directed her creativity to visual arts and poetry until her death in 1998.

His work is influenced by Das Neue Sehen (the New Vision) of Moholy-Nagy, by the Bauhaus of the Weimar Republic and by André Kertész, as well as by the surrealism of Man Ray. As the curator of the exhibition, Juan Vicente Aliaga, points out: "the position in which Bing is placed runs away from any strict norm or visual orthodoxy. In this sense, it can be affirmed that we are facing a look and a conception of the most singular photography in which modernity and formal innovation are accompanied by a humanist temperament in which a social conscience was born".

On the other hand, the Image Cities project, by the photographer Anastasia Samoylova , winning proposal of the first edition of the KBr Photo Award, is a unique visual study of the integration between photography and the urban environment, built in general from the superimposition of the different images while creating great urban collages.

Samoylova travels around the cities and photographs the advertising of fashion brands, beauty brands, bank and real estate advertising, etc., which proliferate on facades, buses and, in general, in the multitude of urban advertising supports. Often monumental advertisements that can be found in any metropolis and that cause them to gradually lose their individuality to gradually become a unique and anonymous image of steel and glass architecture.

In his images, almost no people appear, and when they do it is usually on a minimal scale compared to the size of buildings and advertisements.

The tour of the exhibition, curated by Victoria del Val, is made up of nearly fifty photographs selected from more than two hundred images. The project, which began in Moscow and New York at the beginning of the summer of 2021, has been carried out in fifteen other cities such as Amsterdam, Paris, London, Brussels, Tokyo, Madrid or Barcelona.