[4] When she finished her studies in the summer of 1929 and gave up her dissertation, she turned entirely to photography, bought a newly launched Leica (35mm camera) and began working in photojournalism.

[3] Her move from Frankfurt to the burgeoning avant-garde and surrealist scene in Paris marked the start of the most notable period of her career.

[4] She produced images in the fields of photojournalism, architectural photography, advertising and fashion, and her work was published in magazines such as Le Monde Illustre, Harper's Bazaar, and Vogue.

[1] After initially living in the Hotel Londres on Rue Bonaparte, she moved to Avenue de Maine, 146 in 1931.

With the pianist and music teacher Konrad Wolff, who lived in the same house, she was initially only known through his piano playing, which could be heard through the courtyard.

When Bing visited New York in 1936, she received the offer to work as a photographer for Life magazine, which she turned down in order not to be separated from Wolff, who lived in Paris.

In an interview with the German photographer Herlinde Koelbl, Bing later said: “A lot of people just call it internment camps because we weren't mistreated.

It was worse than you could imagine and you could endure more than you thought possible.”[9]After Wolff stood up for Bing's release at great expense, they managed to reach Marseille together.

The Affidavit of Sponsorship required for this was issued by the author and journalist Hendrik Willem van Loon, whom Bing had already met in 1930.

[11] In New York, Bing had to re-establish her reputation, and although she got steady work in advertising and portrait photography, she failed to receive important commissions as in Paris.

[1] When Bing and her husband fled Paris, she was unable to bring her prints and left them with a friend for safekeeping.

Her style was very different; the softness that characterized her work in the 1930s gave way to hard forms and clear lines, with a sense of harshness and isolation.

Numerous solo exhibitions followed in New York, Las Vegas, Chicago, San Francisco, Frankfurt, and many more.

The emerging attention that Bing has enjoyed from the 1970s through the 1980s can be traced back to the growing fascination and interest in European photography of the 1920s and 1930s.

[19] From 1984 onwards, Ilse Bing made a number of appearances in the USA and Germany as a speaker on the development of modern art, especially photography.

[20] In the last few decades of her life, she wrote poetry, made drawings and collages, and occasionally incorporated bits of photos.

[22] She also discovered a type of solarisation for negatives independently of a similar process developed by the artist Man Ray.

Bing developed a feeling for movement and standstill, which she expressed in the photographs of water as well as of people and objects.

In the book dedicated to Konrad Wolff, Ilse Bing presents 111 associated words, which are listed in three languages (German, English and French) and illustrated by her own drawings:“to be, to have, words, yes, no, why, because, good, bad, crime, pain, envy, mine, i, you, they, identity, reality, illusion, hope, expectation, inspiration, awe, hate, love, ideal, sleep, death, mourning, (to) remember, forgotten, lost, missing, alone, lonely, bored, alive, happy, (to) smile, when, time, timeless, now, yesterday, tomorrow, ever, never, final, endless, no more, eternity, where, here, nowhere, probable, perhaps, sure, obvious, enough, absolute, old, new, discovery, invention, noise, silence, sound, ugly, beautiful, warm, hot, cold, slow, fast, ready, alert, very, and, by, if, so, but, please, thanks, (to) begin, (to) wait, good-bye, something, everything, nothing, this, demonic, true, lie, error, mistake, doubt, trusting, success, bravo, must, chance, hazard, happening, epilogue“[23]Bing explains the choice of words in the book's epilogue:“– i picked the words like flowers in a field.

there is no apparent systems in the choice or order of words, and yet they may stand for, and unveil, the hidden body of my thoughts –”[23]In this work, published in 1976, Ilse Bing dedicates herself to numbers and thus returns to a certain extent to the origins of her academic training when she was still studying mathematics and physics.