Sabine Weiss (née Weber; 23 January 1924 – 28 December 2021) was a Swiss-French photographer active in the French humanist photography movement, along with Robert Doisneau, Willy Ronis, Édouard Boubat, and Izis.

[2]Weiss began to photograph in 1932 with a bakelite camera bought with her pocket money and made contact prints on printing-out paper on her windowsill.

[3] Maywald was working at that time on the first floor of a shed on 22 Jacob Street which belonged to an antiques dealer, and that had neither water nor telephone.

She also worked for several magazines and newspapers known in the United States and Europe for advertising and press orders (Vogue, Paris Match, Life, Time, Town and Country, Holiday, Newsweek, Picture Post, and Die Woche etc.).

Among colleagues Doisneau, Boubat, Brihat, Dieuzaide,[5] Brandt,Ken Heyman, Izis, Kertész, Karsh, Lartigue, Ronis, Savitry, and Elkoury, the only other woman at the Rapho agency was Janine Niépce.

Photojournalist Hans Silvester [Wikidata], who worked with her on a story on the people of Omo (Ethiopia), commented: Although she is in a very masculine environment, she has really managed to be accepted immediately, to establish herself as what she is since: a very great photographer whom I esteem and admire“[4]Weiss's street photography, of children playing in the wasteland of her neighbourhood, Porte de Saint-Cloud and of Paris and its daily life, was produced independently of her magazine work, for love, and embraces the philosophy of humanist photography.

The pictures typify those she took for herself: Intérieur d'église au Portugal ("Interior of a church in Portugal") of 1954 shows a child in white kneeling on the light-dappled tiled floor, face upturned in question toward her barefoot mother, who, like the surrounding phalanx of figures, is dressed in black; the exuberant Un bal champêtre avec une accordéoniste sur la table ("Village dance with an accordion player on the table"), also 1954; and Un enfant tenant un épi qui fait des étincelles in which a child gleefully thrusts a sparkler almost into her lens.

She commented: I photograph to preserve the ephemeral, fix chance, to keep in an image what will disappear: gestures, attitudes, objects which are testimonies of our passing.

[6]In 1957, Weiss created a series of photographs of the painter Kees van Dongen, whom she met through her husband, and on impulse the trio bought a small shed there overlooking the ruins of the castle at Grimaud.

In her late fifties, she participated in a longitudinal photographic study, a kind of 'Mass Observation', of a small new town near Nice called Carros-Ie-Neuf over several years with Jean Dieuzaide and Guy le Querrec, working with sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and joined briefly by Leonard Freed.