ABSTRACT
This chapter considers Ilse Bing's New York photographs of urban life and her self-portraiture in terms of her sense of alienation, a condition that, for Siegfried Kracauer, is an essential state of being for creative production, and central force for photography. Several motifs reappear in her photographs from the 1950s, such as television antennae, detritus, incidental street views, and lamps that recall her solarized images of Parisian streets. As an artist in exile, and in process of becoming culturally and artistically homeless, Bing increasingly engages with her diasporic location, and her extraterritoriality furnishes her with position from which to photograph. The inclusion of Nancy C. Barrett earlier photographs on the table, her dress button, and the Leica all press up against time and space of the photograph, in which Bing positions herself on the periphery, forever the exile. Kracauer himself thought of the exile's true mode of existence to be that of a stranger with an identity that is constantly in flux.
