“The Paris social season opened with a big, elegant splash last Tuesday. The Baronne de Gabrol, President of ESSOR, an association for the protection of France’s abandoned children, sponsored the Winter Ball, at which some of the most distinguished names in Europe amused themselves for the benefit of needy children.”

So begins Inge Morath’s description of the Bal d’Hiver, a dance on ice performed in 1955 by European royalty, in costumes donated by couturiers including Hubert de Givenchy and Christian Dior, and attended by an international roster of celebrities, from the Countess of Paris to film star Charles Chaplin. Morath’s remarkable photos of the event take the viewer behind the scenes of this one-of-a-kind gathering while exhibiting her extraordinary sense of composition and intensely humanistic approach. Each image perfectly illustrates a comment made by the photographer in 1999: “The personal vision is usually there from the beginning; result of a special chemistry of background and feelings, traditions and their rejection, of sensibility and voyeurism. You trust your eye and you cannot help but bare your soul.”

This exhibition at Esopus Space, which I cocurated with John Jacob, then director of the Inge Morath Foundation, consisted of 14 large-scale prints from this original series, which had never been exhibited or published. The show accompanied a piece in Esopus 17 that featured even more images from the series, along with facsimile reproductions of Morath’s descriptive texts of the event for Magnum Photos and a drop-out contact sheet from the photographer’s archives.

An opening reception for the exhibition, combined with a launch event for Esopus 17, took place at Esopus Space on November 2, 2011.