Ina Bandy

Ina Bandy (born Ida Gurevitsch, 14 October 1903 – 1973) was a humanist photographer. Specialising in photographs of children, her work is held in the French National Archives and the Bibliothèque nationale de France. Her family escaped to Moscow at the outbreak of war in 1914, but the Revolution of 1917 nevertheless claimed the life of one of her brothers.

In the early 1920s, Bandy remained in Moscow while her mother accompanied her youngest brother Benjamin to Germany. At this time, Bandy met Nicolas Neumann (alias Nicolas Bandy), a Hungarian photographer who mentored her in photography. They married in 1925 but were to divorce later – even so, Ina Bandy would keep her pseudonym, moving to Germany before settling in France during the early 1930s. In Paris, she became a member of Alliance Photo, a photographic agency founded by René Zuber and directed by Maria Eisner, but she would cross into the zone libre at the outbreak of World War II. and Bandy helped to photograph these children, remaining attached to the ‘Village D’Enfants’ until her death in 1973.

In 1948, Ina Bandy also became a member of Le Groupe des XV, putting her in the company of other humanist photographers such as Willy Ronis and Sabine Weiss.

Bandy also worked for organisations such as UNESCO, Air France, the French National Archives and the Louvre. and the French National Archives. She was commissioned by Régine Pernoud, conservator at the Museum of History in France between 1949 and 1974. They are currently being digitised by the Courtauld Institute of Art, as part of the Courtauld Connects project.

2013: La vie a fleur d’objectif, a solo exhibition of Ina Bandy's works, the Gallery of the Alliance Française de Bruxelles-Europe, Brussels. Her photographs taken in Sri Lanka between 1955 and 1956 are used as sources for the illustrations in E. F. C. Ludowyk's book The Footprint of the Buddha.