Photographer Focus #8: Sabine Weiss

I wasn’t aware of Sabine Weiss until she appeared in one of my deep dives about humanist photographers. One of her most known photographs was taken it in 1952, Porte de Vanves. To be honest, I don’t recognise the area, even though I went to engineering school not too far, the area changed a lot. The horse is out in the snow, kicking up its heels. There’s no drama in the frame, just an animal having a moment on a patch of waste ground. It became the most reproduced of the pictures she took, and sold at auction for nearly $3,500 at Christie’s. In an interview with the Guardian, late in her life, she said about it: “That one, to me, is a portrait of solitude. My world, as a photographer, has to be about loneliness. And so it is I’ve learned to love solitude as well as all the rest”. Porte de Vanves, 1952 I can understand what she means about solitude. To me, photography is also a act of isolation, a way to deal with the world in your own. I spent countless winter mornings at the beach in…