Gisèle Freund

Gisèle Freund
Self-portrait
Born	(1908-12-19)19 December 1908 Berlin, Germany
Died	31 March 2000(2000-03-31) (aged 91) Paris, France
Nationality	German-born French
Known for	Photography
Spouse	Pierre Blum ​ ​ (m. 1935; div. 1948)​

Gisèle Freund (born Gisela Freund; 19 December 1908 in Schöneberg District, Berlin  – 31 March 2000 in Paris) was a German-born French photographer and photojournalist, famous for her documentary photography and portraits of writers and artists. Her best-known book, Photographie et société (1974), a revised edition of her seminal 1936 dissertation, is an sociohistorical study about the uses and abuses of the photographic medium in the age of technological reproduction. In 1977, she became president of the French Union of Photographers, and in 1981, she took the official portrait of French President François Mitterrand.

She was made Officier des Arts et Lettres in 1982 and Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, the highest decoration in France, in 1983. In 1991, she became the first photographer to be honored with a retrospective at the Musée national d'art moderne in Paris.

Freund's major contributions to photography include using the Leica Camera (with its ability to house 35 mm film rolls with 36 frames) for documentary reportage and her early experimentation with Kodachrome and Agfacolor, which allowed her to develop a "uniquely candid portraiture style" that distinguishes her in 20th-century photography.

She is buried at the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris near her home and studio at 12 rue Lalande.

Biography

Max Slevogt, Portrait of Julius Freund, 1925

Early years

Freund was born into a textile merchant family on 19 December 1908 to Julius and Clara (née Dressel) Freund, a wealthy Jewish couple in the Schöneberg district of Berlin.

Her father, Julius Freund, was a keen art collector with an interest in the work of photographer Karl Blossfeldt, whose close-up studies explored the forms of natural objects. Freund's father bought Gisèle her first camera, a Voigtländer 6 × 9 in 1925 and a Leica camera as a present for her graduation in 1929.

In 1931, Freund studied sociology and art history at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Breisgau, Germany; and in 1932 and 1933 she studied at the University of Frankfurt Institute for Social Research under Theodor W. Adorno, Karl Mannheim and Norbert Elias (also known as the Frankfurt School). At university she became an active member of a student socialist group and was determined to use photography as an integral part of her socialist practice. One of her first stories, shot on 1 May 1932, "shows a recent march of anti-fascist students" who had been "regularly attacked by Nazi groups". The photos show Walter Benjamin, a good friend of Freund, and Bertolt Brecht.

Paris

In March 1933, a month after Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, Walter Benjamin fled to Paris on 30 May, Gisèle followed him since she was both a socialist activist and a Jew. She escaped to Paris with her negatives strapped around her body to get them past the border guards. Gisèle and Walter Benjamin would continue their friendship in Paris, where Freund would famously photograph him reading at the National Library. They both studied and wrote about art in the 19th and 20th centuries as Freund continued her studies at the Sorbonne.

In 1935, André Malraux invited Freund to document the First International Congress in Defence of Culture in Paris, where she was introduced to and subsequently photographed many of the notable French artists of her day. Freund befriended the famed literary partners, Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company, and Adrienne Monnier of Maison des Amis des Livres. In 1935, Monnier arranged a marriage of convenience for Freund with Pierre Blum so that Freund could obtain a visa to remain in France legally (they officially divorced after the war in 1948).

In 1936, while Sylvia Beach was visiting the United States, Freund moved into Monnier and Beach's shared apartment and they became intimates. When Beach returned, she ended her intimate relationship with Monnier yet maintained a strong friendship with both Monnier and Freund. Freund finished her Ph.D. in sociology and art at the Sorbonne in 1936, and Monnier published the doctoral dissertation as "La photographie en France au dix-neuvième siècle", under the La Maison des Amis des Livres imprint by Monnier.

Monnier "introduced [Freund] to the artists and writers who would prove her most captivating subjects." Later that year, Freund became internationally famous with her photojournalistic piece, "Northern England", which was published in Life magazine on 14 December 1936, and showed the effects of the depression in England. No magazine in France could publish color photographs at that time, so Freund's work with Life—one of the first color mass magazines—would start a lifelong relationship between the photographer and magazine.

In 1938, Monnier suggested that Freund photograph James Joyce for his upcoming book, Finnegans Wake. Joyce, who disliked being photographed, invited Freund to his Paris flat for a private screening of her previous work. He was impressed enough by Freund's work to allow her to photograph him, and over a period of three days, she captured the most intimate portraits of Joyce during his time in Paris. During one of the sessions he hit his head on a light, which cut his forehead. Joyce exclaimed, "I'm bleeding. Your damned photos will be the death of me", which he said, "forgetting in his pain that he had made it a rule never to swear in the presence of a lady." Freund was in a taxi crash right after the photo-session, which caused her cameras to crash to the ground. She called Joyce and said, "Mr. Joyce, you damned my photos — you put some kind of a bad Irish spell on them and my taxi crashed. I was almost killed and your photos are ruined". Being superstitious, Joyce was convinced that his cursing in front of a lady had caused the crash, so he invited Freund back to his home for a second round of photographs. Time magazine used one of these photos for its cover on 8 May 1939. The entire series of photographs would eventually be published in 1965 in James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years by Freund and V. B. Carleton and a preface by Simone de Beauvoir.

In 1939, after being "twice refused admission to Tavistock Square", Freund gained the confidence of Virginia Woolf and captured the iconic color photographs of the Woolfs on display in the English National Portrait Gallery. Woolf even "agreed to change her clothes to see which best suited the colour harmony and insisted on being photographed with Leonard (and their spaniel Pinka). In some of the prints, Woolf is pale and lined, in others smiling a little and more youthful. The background of fabrics and mural panels by Bell and Grant adds to the value of the images; this was the inner sanctum of the queen of Bloomsbury where parties were given and friends came to tea. Just over a year later the house was destroyed in The Blitz."

On 10 June 1940, with the Nazi invasion of Paris looming, Freund escaped Paris to the free zone in the Dordogne. Her husband by convenience, Pierre, had been captured by the Nazis and sent to a prison camp. He was able to escape and met with Freund before going back to Paris to fight in the Resistance. As the wife of an escaped prisoner, a Jew, and a socialist, Freund "feared for her life".

Buenos Aires, Mexico, and Paris again

In 1942, with the help of André Malraux, who told his friends, "we must save Gisèle!", Freund fled to Buenos Aires, Argentina "at the invitation of Victoria Ocampo, director of the periodical Sur. Ocampo was at the center of the Argentinean intellectual elite, and through her Freund met and photographed many great writers and artists, such as Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda."

While living in Argentina, Freund started a publishing venture called Ediciones Victoria, that would feature books on France. She writes, "In reality, I started this for the De Gaulle government in exile where I was working in the Information ministry, volontairement without payment." She also founded a relief action committee for French artists and became a spokesperson for Free France. She got back to Paris in 1946 with an exhibtion on Latin America ready, and three tons of collected provisions for writers and journalists.

In 1947, Freund signed a contract with Magnum Photos as a Latin America contributor, but by 1954, she was declared persona non grata by the U.S. government at the height of the Red Scare for her socialist views, and Robert Capa forced her to break ties with Magnum. In 1950, her photo coverage of a bejewelled Evita Perón for Life magazine caused a diplomatic stir between the United States and Argentina and upset many of Perón's supporters—the ostentatious photographs went against the official party line of austerity; Life was blacklisted in Argentina, and once again, Freund had to escape a country with her negatives. She moved to Mexico and became friends with Diego Rivera, Frida Kahlo, Alfaro Siqueiros, and José Clemente Orozco. In 1953, she moved back to Paris permanently. Over the life of her career, she went on over 80 photojournalistic assignments for Life , Time, The Sunday Times, Picture Post, Weekly Illustrated, and the French Vu, Paris Match, Points de Vue, and Arts et Décoration, as well as the Swiss Du. From the 1960s onward, Freund continued to write and managed her archive. In 1977, she became president of the Fédération Française des Associations des Photographes Créateurs, the photographer's trade union, a position Henry Cartier-Bresson previously held. The same year Germany saw her first retrospective and she paticipated in the documenta 6, an important international exhibition for contemporary art, which was part of the rising recognition of photography in the art world. Her reputation as an important portrait photographer grew with each successive exhibition. She is now celebrated as one of the best portrait photographers of the twentieth century: Upon her death, "President Jacques Chirac praised her as 'one of the world's greatest photographers'."

Notable work

Freund's dissertation was a seminal sociohistorical study on photography, first published in book form by Adrienne Monnier in 1936, and a revised version was published in the 1970s with translations in several languages. One of her best-known early photo works shows her friends Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht participating in one of the last political street demonstrations in Germany before Hitler took power. In 1936 Freund photographed the effects of the Depression in England for Life. Freund became famous for her colour portraits of writers and artists, including Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, Henry Matisse, Marcel Duchamp and many others. In 1981, Freund made her (unretouched) official portrait of François Mitterrand, who was President of France (1981–1995).

In Freund's obituary for The New York Times, Suzanne Daley writes, "[Freund] specialized in conveying the attitude of her subjects. She focused on hands, body posture and clothing. Reviewing an exhibition of her life's work in 1979, Hilton Kramer wrote in The New York Times that she excelled in 'brilliant documentation rather than originality.' In a 1996 interview, Ms. Freund said she read her subjects' work and often spent hours discussing their books with them before taking a portrait." Indeed, it was Freund's ability to connect with writers and artists—especially the famously difficult James Joyce—that gave her the ability to photograph them with their guard down.

Gisèle Freund's gravestone at Montparnasse Graveyard, Paris.

Quotations

From "Photographer" (1985)

• "For a writer, his portrait is the only link he can establish with his readers. When we read a book whose content moves us, we are interested to look at the author's face, which is generally printed on the jacket since the publisher is aware of our wish to see if these features correspond to the idea we have formed of the author. This image is thus very important to the man of letters. He prefers a photographer in whom he can have confidence."

From Photography & Society

• "The lens, the so-called impartial eye, actually permits every possible distortion of reality: the character of the image is determined by the photographer's point of view and the demands of his patrons. The importance of photography does not rest primarily in its potential as an art form, but rather in its ability to shape our ideas, to influence our behaviour, and to define our society" (4).
• "In our technological age, when industry is always trying to create new needs, the photographic industry has expanded enormously because the photograph meets modem man's pressing need to express his own individuality" (5).
• Although the first inventor of photography, Nicéphore Niépce, tried desperately to have his invention recognized, his efforts were in vain and he died in misery. Few people know his name today. But photography, which he discovered, has become the most common language of our civilization" (218).
• "When you do not like human beings, you cannot make good portraits."

Awards

• 1977 – Elected President of the trade union Fédération Française des Associations des Photographes Créateurs (France)
• 1977 – Guest of honor at the annual international festival Rencontres de la photographie d'Arles (France)
• 1978 – Cultural prize of the German Society for Photography (DGPh, Germany)
• 1980 – Grand Prix national de la photographie (France)
• 1982 – Officier des Arts et Lettres (France)
• 1983 – Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur (France)
• 1987 – Officier de Mérite (France)
• 1989 – Doctor honoris causa, National Museum of Photography at Bradford University (UK)

Exhibitions

Michel Dieuzaide (1981) Gisèle Freund (second at right) at the opening of her exhibition at Galerie municipale du Château d'eau, Toulouse, March 1981 with (from left) Michel Tournier, Jean Dieuzaide, Michel Delaborde, unidentified woman.

• 1939 – La Maison des Amis des Livres, Paris, France
• 1942 – Galerie Amigos del Arte, Buenos Aires, Argentina
• 1945 – Palacio de Bellas Artes, Valparaiso Galeria de Arte, Buenos Aires, Argentina
• 1946 – Maison de l'Amerique latine, Paris, France
• 1962 – Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, Petit Palais, France
• 1963 – Le portrait francais au XXe siecle [French Portraiture in the 20th Century]. Bibliothèque nationale de France, Cabinet des estampes, Paris, France & Berlin and Dusseldorf, Germany
• 1964 – Ecrivains et artistes français et britanniques. Institut Francais du Royaume-Uni, London, U.K.
• 1965 – Princeton Art Museum, US
• 1966 – Mona Bismarck American Center, Paris, France
• 1968 – Au pays des visages, 1938–1968: trente ans d'art et de littérature a travers la camera de Gisèle Freund [In the realm of faces: thirty years of art and literature through the lens of Gisèle Freund]. Musée d'Art moderne de la ville de Paris & Fondation Rayaumont, Asnieres-sur-Oise
• 1973 – Musée Descartes, Amsterdam, Netherlands
• 1975 – Giselle Freund[sic]. Robert Schoelkopf Gallery, New York, US
• 1976 – Focus Gallery, San Francisco, California, US
• 1977 – Gisèle Freund: Fotografien 1932–1977. Rheinisches Landesmuseum Bonn, Germany (first major restrospective, catalogue)

– Musée Réattu, Rencontres de la photographie d'Arles

– Fotoforum, Frankfurt, Germany

– Documenta 6, Kassel, Germany

– David Mirvich Gallery, Toronto, Canada.

• 1978 – Watari Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, Japan

– Shadai Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

– Marcus Krakow Gallery, Boston, US

• 1979 – Sidney Janis Gallery, New York, US (catalogue)
• 1980 – Galerie Agathe Gaillard, Paris, France

– Galerie photo art basel (Anita Neugebauer), Basel, Switzerland

• 1981 – Galerie municipale du Chateau d'Eau, Toulouse, France

– Center for Creative Photography, Tucson, Arizona, US

– Axiom Gallery, Sydney, Australia.

• 1982 – Koplin Gallery, Los Angeles, US

– The Photographers Gallery, London

• 1983 – Boston National Library, US

– Center for Creative Art, New Orleans, US

– Stanford University Museum

• 1984 – Fotoforum, Frankfurt, Germany
• 1985 – Itinéraires. retrospective, Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (catalogue)
• 1987 – Galerie zur Stockeregg, Zurich, Switzerland

– Photographs of James Joyce and Friends. Gotham Book Mart & Gallery, New York, US

• 1988 – Gisèle Freund, Werkbund-Archiv, Museum der Alltagskultur des 20. Jahrhunderts, Berlin, Germany
• 1989 – Gisèle Freund: James Joyce, 1939, Galerie de France, Paris, France

– Gisèle Freund, James Joyce in Paris, Galerie photo art basel, Basel, Switzerland

• 1991 – Galerie photo art basel, Basel, Switzerland

– Frida Kahlo et ses amis. Galerie de France, Paris

• 1992 – Center for Contemporary Art, Mexico
• 1993 – Gisèle Freund. Seoul Museum, South Korea
• 1994 – Galerie Clairefontaine, Luxembourg
• 1995 – Fotografien zum 1. Mai 1932. Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt, Germany
• 1996 – Gisèle Freund, 1st International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture, Paris 1935. Goethe Institute, Paris, France

– Gesichter der Sprache. Sprengel Museum, Hanover, Germany (catalogue)

– Malraux sous le regard de Gisèle Freund. Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, France

– Verso Gallery, Tokyo, Japan

– Galerie Michiko Matsumoto, Tokyo, Japan

– Gisèle Freund: Berlin, Frankfurt, Paris. Fotografien 1929–1962. Berliner Festspiele, Berlin, Germany (catalogue)

• 1999 – Adrienne Monnier, Saint-John Perse et les amis des livres. Musée Municipal Saint-John Perse, Point-à-Pitre, and the Fondation Saint-John Perse, Aix-en-Provence, France
• 2002–2004 – Gisèle Freund. El mundo y mi cámara. Travelling retrospective in Spain: Centre de Cultura Contemporanea, Barcelona, Museu Comarcal de la Garrotxa, Olot, Caja General de Ahorros de Granada, Fundació Sa Nostra in Palma de Mallorca, Fundación Municipal de Cultura, Valladolid (catalogue)
• 2006 – Susana Soca and her circles seen by Gisèle Freund. Maison de l'Amerique latine, Paris, France

– Montevideo and Soca, Uruguay

• 2008 – Gisèle Freund: ritratti d'autore, 1908–2008, cento anni dalla nascita. Galleria Carla Sozzani, Milan, Italy (catalogue)

– Gisèle Freund reframes Berlin, 1957-1962. Willy-Brandt-Haus and Ephraim Palace, Berlin. (catalogue)

• 2011–2012 – Gisèle Freund: L'Œil frontière. Fondation Pierre Bergé - Yves Saint Laurent, Paris, France 1933-1940" (catalogue)
• 2014 – From Paris to Victoria: Gisèle Freund's James Joyce Photographs. University of Victoria, Canada
• 2014 – Gisèle Freund: Photographische Szenen und Porträts. Academy of Arts, Berlin, Germany (catalogue)
• 2015 – Frida Kahlo: Mirror, Mirror. Throckmorton Fine Art, New York

Books by Gisèle Freund

• La photographie en France au dix-neuvième siècle [French Photography in the 19th Century], dissertation, La Maison des Amis des Livres, Paris1936.
• France, 1945.
• Guia Arquitectura Mexicana Contemporánea [Guide to Contemporary Mexican Architecture]
• Mexique precolombien [Pre-Columbian Mexico], 1954.
• James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years, foreword by Simone de Beauvoir, text by V. B. Carleton, Harcourt, Brace & World, New York 1965, ISBN 1111804478.
• Le monde et ma camera, Denoël, Paris 1970, ISBN 9782207257920 (2006 ed.). (memoir)

• The World and My Camera, The Dial Press, New York 1974, ISBN 080379732X.

• Photographie et societé, revised and expanded edition of her dissertation, Seuil (Coll. Points), Paris 1974, ISBN 202000660X.

• Photography & Society, David R. Godine, Boston 1980, ISBN 0879232501,
• and Gordon Fraser, London 1980, ISBN 0860920496.

• Memoires de l'œil [Memories of the Eye], Seuil, Paris 1977, ISBN 2020046474.
• Portfolio: Au pays des visages [In the Landscape of Faces], ed. of 36 signed copies with ten portraits, Lunn Gallery/Graphics International, 1978.
• Trois jours avec Joyce , Denoël, Paris 1982, ISBN 2207228061.

• Three Days with Joyce, Persea, New York 1985, ISBN 9780892550968.
• and Van Gennep, Amsterdam 1985, ISBN 9060126637.

• Itinéraires, autobiographical monograph, foreword by Christian Caujolle, on the occasion of the retrospective at the Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou/Albin Michel, Paris 1985 (French), ISBN 9782226024718.

• Gisèle Freund, Photographer , Abrams, New York 1985, ISBN 9780810909397.

• Gisèle Freund. Poetry of the Portrait: Photographs of Writers and Artists, Engl. ed. by Roger W. Benner, preface by Freund, Schirmer Art Books (Masters of the Camera), Munich 1989.
• Gisèle Freund, Portrait. Entretiens avec Rauda Jamis , interviews with Rauda Jamis, Des Femmes, Paris 1991, ISBN 9782721004222.
• La Photographie en France au XIXe siècle , revised and expanded edition with André Gunthert, Christian Bourgois/Seuil (Points), 2011, ISBN 9782267022650.

Books about Gisèle Freund

• Honnef, Klaus. Gisèle Freund: Fotografien 1932-1977 (in German). Bonn: Rheinisches Landesmuseum.
• Neyer, Hans Joachim (1988). Gisèle Freund (in German). Berlin: Argon, Museumspädagogischer Dienst. OCLC 21045272.
• Catalogue de l'œuvre photographique Gisèle Freund (in French). Paris: Editions du Centre Pompidou. 1991. ISBN 978-2-85850-646-0.
• Flavell, M. Kay (29 March 1994). You have seen their faces: Gisèle Freund, Walter Benjamin and Margaret Bourke-White as headhunters of the thirties. Berkeley: University of California, Center for German and European Studies. OCLC 32087994.
• Gesichter der Sprache. Schriftsteller um Adrienne Monnier. Fotografien zwischen 1935 und 1940 (in German). Hannover: Sprengel Museum. 1996. ISBN 978-3-89169-107-6.

Gisèle Freund. El mundo y mi cámara

• Perolini, Elisabeth; Neri, Grazia (2007). Gisèle Freund: ritratti d'autore. Silvana. ISBN 9788836609857. OCLC 190838214.
• Corpet, Olivier; Thiek, Catherine (2011). Gisèle Freund: l'oeil frontière, Paris 1933–1940 (in French). Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent. ISBN 978-2-7118-5924-5. OCLC 770222870.
• Les carnets de Gisèle Freund (in French). Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, Petit Palais. 2013. ISBN 978-2-7118-5925-2.
• Cortanze, Gerard de (2015). Frida Kahlo. The Gisèle Freund Photographs. New York: Abrams. ISBN 978-1-4197-1423-8.

Film and television

The 1996 documentary Paris Was a Woman features interviews with Gisèle Freund as she recollects her experiences in Paris during the 1930s.

1979 Zeugen des Jahrhunderts: Gisèle Freund [Witnesses of the Century].

Rights and permissions

Freund's estate is managed through l'Institut Mémoires de l'Édition Contemporaine (IMEC), Paris, France.