Ina Bandy

Bandy was born Ida Gurevitsch to a relatively non-religious Jewish family in Tallinn, Estonia, then a part of the Russian Empire.[2] 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.[3]

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.[1]

After World War II, Bandy went back to Paris and moved into the Hotel de Paix, where she set up her workshop on the ground floor.[3]

She produced photographic commissions for various newspapers and magazines such as ELLE, Médecine de France and Art News. While photographing a group of children living at a Paris Metro station for the Combat newspaper, Bandy met Robert Ardouvin, founder of ‘Les Amis des Enfants de Paris’. From 1948 the association housed underprivileged children in a village in Vercheny[4] and Bandy helped to photograph these children, remaining attached to the ‘Village D’Enfants’ until her death in 1973.[5]

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.[3][6]

Bandy also worked for organisations such as UNESCO, Air France, the French National Archives and the Louvre.[3] Her friendship with Régine Pernoud, a French medieval historian, would also lead her to take photographs of seals, medals, and medieval churches.[3]