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.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, bars at night became a popular subject for artists in Paris. By positioning the viewer outside the bar and using the solarisation technique to transform shapes and tones, Bing used photography to treat the subject in a new way.

Solarisation happens when negatives are exposed to specific amounts of light in the darkroom during developing and printing, producing partly reversed images. Bing’s experiments developed from an interest in light; as she explained, at the time, ‘light was considered the medium that permits photography. But for me it became the main subject: the protagonist of my photography’. The bar lights become abstract spheres that reflect off shiny surfaces, drawing our attention away from the human forms placed between the geometric door frames.