Ilse Bing (1899-1998) was one of several leading women photographers in the inter-war period. Born into a Jewish family in Frankfurt, she initially pursued an academic career before moving to Paris in 1930 to concentrate on photography.

Bing’s modernist vision was not restricted just to clean planes and geometrical structures. Paris presented a complex urban scene that was modern yet also worn and weathered. As with contemporary Surrealist townscapes, the past broke through. The modernisation of the urban fabric cast light on the battered remains of an older place – the exhausted pomp of the Père Lachaise cemetery, or dark apartment blocks reflected in gutters. Her best images of Paris are informed by a chaotic layering of signs of disregarded culture, like the wasted potted plants in her study of a pavement or the abject torn posters on a wooden fence.