"We became aware of her immense talent late in the day when she went through the entire history of European photography and that young women to embark on this profession, alone, at the time, were very rare", regrets the 79-year-old photographer, interviewed by AFP.

"We were not from the same world, she was part of the French humanists like Robert Doisneau, about whom we spoke in the United States and who were a little my peers, me rather of the report. Our common point is a formidable interest. for the human, with for Sabine, a feminine gaze, very fine, rare ", he says.

"I felt in her a compassion and much more, tenderness and a delicacy that men lacked," he adds, calling himself a "youngster", admiringly.

Laure Augustins, who has accompanied Sabine Weiss on a daily basis since 2011, tells AFP, with emotion, her meeting with this woman "hard at work, sparkling, humble, funny, generous, simple, spiritual".

She has given herself the "mission" of "making known as much as possible" her work, consecrated during her lifetime by nearly 160 exhibitions around the world.

"Sabine was happy" to appreciate her work "after having often doubted it while having an extraordinary faith in herself; she qualified it as" clean "by looking at her archives, after having leafed through a catalog of Willy Ronis' photos (1910-2009) ", who was like her a great figure in the humanist movement.

Sabine Weiss visits a retrospective exhibition of her work in Vannes in Morbihan on July 16, 2020 Loic VENANCE AFP / Archives

She was endowed with an "insatiable curiosity for the human being and the lives of people", and tirelessly cultivated "gratitude", she underlines.

"She said that she had been very lucky in life but she had provoked it well", she continues, recounting that "very small already, at seven or eight years old, Sabine Weiss sold chestnuts to make gifts to the people of his family ".

"Never tearful"

Raymond Depardon more particularly remembers an exhibition in Arles, in the south of France, a few years ago: "She spoke to us, through her photos, of our parents and our grandparents ... she transmitted the essential, the unity which unites all human beings, without ever being tearful ".

It gave to see a "human presence to which young photographers seem to come back in force", he adds.

The Center Pompidou paid tribute to a photographer who, like Doisneau and Ronis, "forged the image of the humanist city of the 1950s" and "the last witness to this golden age of Parisian photography".

Sabine Weiss, says Ms. Augustins, "did not speak of aesthetics but of the importance of leaving a testimony on her time, on the passage of time. Beyond her work in advertising, fashion, which had been her livelihood in color, black and white was her relaxation, she kept it in boxes, with little notebooks that we rediscovered together with complicity ".

Sabine Weiss during a photoshoot at her home in Paris on December 15, 2020 JOEL SAGET AFP / Archives

Just like her last meeting with the public in Deauville (north-west of France) in October at the Planches contact festival, where "she spent her life like a ball of wool with humor and mischief, forgetting that I was whispering to her the dates and keeping only his joy at having succeeded in making people laugh ".

"Monday evening," confides the employee, the babysitter who takes care of her in the evening told me that she had taken a long time to get to her bed because she wanted to touch all the objects in her workshop, real cabinet of curiosities filled with stones, sketchbooks, ex-votos and sacred objects, as if she was saying goodbye to them before leaving ".

© 2021 AFP