Binia Bill – Images and Fragments

Binia Bill (1904­–1988) turned to photography with ambition and confidence. After training as a concert cellist, she attended the photography class given by Lucia Moholy at Berlin’s Itten School in 1930 and worked as a freelance photographer when back in Zurich. In 1931, she married the architect and artist Max Bill. To earn a living, the couple worked together on advertising commissions, for which she produced the images while he designed the typography and layout. In the years that followed, Binia Bill created a remarkable photographic oeuvre: Her portraits and still lifes are characterised by a clear visual language that is related to the aesthetics of the ‘Neues Sehen’ movement. Binia Bill’s interest in perspectives and surfaces, in playing with light and shadow, was combined with a very distinct sensitivity though, which influenced her view of objects, plants, animals and people.

When she became a mother in 1942, Binia Bill gave up photography – her oeuvre fell into oblivion. What remains of it not only bears witness to her extraordinary creativity, but also gives her an important place in the history of photography. She was one of the few women in Switzerland to have worked professionally and artistically with a camera in the first half of the 20th century. Exactly two decades after her first and so far only retrospective, at Aargauer Kunsthaus, it is high time to honour her oeuvre anew, including her unpublished works.