The Swiss Museum of the Elysée (Lausanne) received a superb gift. Photographer Sabine Weiss gave the museum her photographic heritage. The museum will have the task of preserving and enhancing the value of this photographic collection estimated to complete negatives (200 000) and contact sheets (7 000), 2 700 vintage prints and 2 000 modern prints, 2 000 slides and a set of personal documentation (personal photographs, press archives, reviews, correspondence, recordings, etc.).
Sabine Weiss was born in 1924 in Saint-Gingolph. Of Swiss origin, she was trained in Geneva by Paul Boissonnas before becoming the assistant of Willy Maywald in 1946 in Paris. She married the American painter Hugh Weiss. Her street photography is known among the most known of her works, focusing mostly on people and children, exploring various mediums, from black and white to color. Her work is also diversed, as she explored fashion, advertising, reports, portraits. She was exhibited at the MoMA in 1953 (Post-War European Photography), and at the Art Institute in Chicago. She is a figurehead of humanist photography.
