My Shadow on the Roof with Leica (and Mart Stam), Hellerhof Settlement, Frankfurt-am-Main
Ilse Bing German
Not on view
As a student at the University of Frankfurt, Bing took up photography to illustrate her doctoral thesis on the German Baroque architect Friedrich Gilly (1772-1800). She purchased a handheld Leica camera in 1929 and quickly established herself as one of the leading avant-garde photographers of the interwar period. The following year, Mart Stam, a Dutch modernist architect who taught at the Bauhaus design school, commissioned Bing to photograph all of his housing developments in Frankfurt. The resulting photographs translated the functional beauty of Stam's modernist buildings into dynamic compositions characteristic of the era's "New Photography" movement. In this wonderfully off-kilter image, we see the shadows of Bing and Stam standing side by side on the rooftop of one of his Frankfurt developments, like ghosts of the modernist utopia they both envisioned.
