Sabine Weiss × Nathalie Boutté: Hommage

A major figure in French humanist photography, Sabine Weiss was not only a street, fashion, and advertising photographer but also a photojournalist for numerous international magazines. Over the course of sixty years, she explored all aspects of her profession.

In contrast to Sabine Weiss, who built her body of work by photographing on the street or undertaking studio commissions, Nathalie Boutté creates paper works, inspired by images produced by important photographers. Her process is meticulous: she cuts hundreds of strips of paper bearing texts related to the chosen image—here, quotes from Sabine Weiss—before assembling them to reconstruct the original photograph. The grayscale tones of the paper strips create gradients, similar to pixels on a digital screen. Up close, the text on the paper strips is revealed, but it is by stepping back that the image is revealed. By opening the photographer’s archives to Nathalie Boutté’s gaze, Photo Elysée unveils an unknown aspect of Sabine Weiss’s work, notably her studio work.

The exhibition presents a selection of iconic works by the photographer and reveals some treasures among the numerous negatives, prints, and contact sheets that make up her archives. In 2017, aware of the importance of preserving her work, Sabine Weiss chose Photo Elysée to house her archive, which arrived in the museum’s collections at Plateforme 10 at the beginning of 2024.

Photo Elysée boasts one of the largest collections dedicated to photography in the world, covering the entire history of the medium from its invention in the 19th century to digital technologies. At Photo Elysée, Sabine Weiss joins other photography names such as René Burri, Leonard Freed, Henriette Grindat, Monique Jacot, Lehnert & Landrock, and Ella Maillart.