Photo of Virginia Woolf by Gisele Freund, c1939

Photo: 8" x 12"
Frame: 15 1/2" x 19"

Gisele Freund
(source: jwa.org)From her photographs of a rally in Berlin to her insightful portraits of Evita Peron, Gisele Freund captured the people who shaped the early twentieth century. Freund photographed a May Day rally in 1932 that served as a harbinger of Hitlers rise to power. She fled Germany for Paris in 1933 and earned her PhD in 1936 with a dissertation on the social impact of photography. In 1942, after two years in hiding, she left occupied France for South America, where she began publishing books and doing documentary reportage for magazines, including an infamous 1950 piece for Life Magazine on General Peron and his wife. In 1953 she returned to Paris, where she became president of the French Federation of Creative Photographers in 1977.

A whole life is terrifying and wondrous-- exclaimed Elsa Triolet upon seeing a show of Gisele Freunds color portraits at the Paris Musee dArt Moderne in 1968. With these words she described the extraordinary life and work of Gisele Freund, European intellectual and writer, sociologist, historian of photography, a socialist, a Jew, and one of the worlds greatest photographers.

Early Life and Family
Freund was born into a wealthy Jewish family in the Schoneberg district of Berlin in 1912. Her father, Julius Freund (1870-1941), a textile merchant with a passion for collecting nineteenth- and twentieth-century German art, introduced Gisele to the work of Karl Blossfeldt (1865-1932), a botanist who explored the formal elements of beauty in plants through photography. Her mother Clara (nee Dresel) died in 1946. Upon graduation from high school, her father presented his daughter with a Leica camera, which Gisele later said became her companion all her life. In 1931 Freund began studying sociology and the history of art at the world-famous Institute for Social Research of Frankfurt University, where her teachers included Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Karl Mannheim (1893-1947), and her tutor, Norbert Elias (1897-1990), one of the leading social theorists of the day.

Photography During World War II
During her university years, Freund documented life in Frankfurt. On May 1, 1932, Freund photographed a May Day rally that erupted in chaos against the National Socialist government. Later she would say, In January 1933, Hitler became chancellor of the Reich and established his dictatorship in Germany. Many of those I photographed on that May Day in 1932 became members of the Nazi party; others ended up in concentration camps.

Being Jewish and a fervent opponent of National Socialism, Freund was an overt activist and a member of an anti-Fascist group. When one of her friends was imprisoned and murdered, Freund was told she must leave the country. On May 30, 1933, with little more than her camera, and with photographic negatives taped around her body to get past the border guards, Freund fled Germany. She did not set foot on German soil again until 1957.

Among the thousands of German refugees pouring into France, Freund arrived in Paris in 1933. Forced to give up her studies in Frankfurt, she continued her research at the Sorbonne, working on her dissertation in the Bibliotheque Nationale, where she met Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), writer and literary critic, himself a recent German refugee, and a Jew. They shared a mutual desire to displace the empty, iconic forms of fascist art and writing with an intimate humanism in the arts, and a need to restore meaning and value to a world emptied of content.

For Freund this meant photographing people as thinking, feeling human beings involved in the aesthetic commonality of letters, books, and paintings. By 1935 she had met Adrienne Monnier (1892-1955), poet, feminist writer, publisher, and a central figure in the contemporary avant-garde scene in France. In 1936 Monnier published Freunds ground-breaking doctoral dissertation on photography in nineteenth-century France, the first thesis of its kind to address the value and importance of photography as a social, democratizing force.

By 1939, with Monniers assistance, Freund had photographed some of the greatest literary and artistic figures of the twentieth century: Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, James Joyce, Henri Matisse, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Cocteau, Andre Breton (1896-1966), Colette, Andre Malraux, Paul Valery, and Sylvia Beach (1887-1962). In 1938 she began taking portraits in color, becoming the first woman photographer in France to use 35mm color film and color slides, the latter a new technology and method of showing her work that Freund would continue throughout her life.

Freund did not attempt to capture the essence of a person in one photograph, but preferred to show a changing stream of consciousness. Especially fond of writers, she photographed them in their homes or in the atmosphere they were most familiar with. Strongly influenced by the realist movement among American writers, Freund stated she did not make portraits her profession and never owned a photography studio. Refusing to pose her subjects, Freund learned that by engaging her sitters in conversation she could evoke a sense of vitality and loved using color because it came closer to life. Ahead of her time, she changed photographic portraiture by refusing to use staging, props, makeup, or retouching to beautify the image.

Though Freund became a naturalized French citizen in 1936, being Jewish meant she had to face displacement again. In 1940 she fled occupied Paris for southern France where she lived underground for two years. In her memoirs (The World in My Camera) she wrote:

On June 10, 1940, the government left Paris. Three days later, directly before the German troops arrived, I left at dawn on a bicycle--the trains were no longer running. On the rack I had attached my little suitcase, the same one I had brought with me to Paris seven years before. I found asylum in a small village in the Dordogne. Several weeks later, I was informed that my husband had been made a prisoner of war. He got word to me that he would try to escape and succeeded a few months later. I met him in the still unoccupied part of France. He told me he would go back to Paris to fight the Germans in the Resistance, and advised me to leave the country as soon as possible. Being of German origin, undoubtedly listed by the Gestapo, and now the wife of an escaped prisoner as well, I actually feared for my life.

Finally, in 1942, through the intervention of her friend Andre Malraux (1901-1976), arrangements were made for her to find refuge in Argentina, at the invitation of Victoria Ocampo (1891-1979), director of the periodical Sur in Buenos Aires. 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.

Freund became cultural attache for the Ministry of Information of Free France while in South America, and founded Ediciones Victoria to publish books about France. While the war continued overseas, Freund focused on producing documentary reportage and films on remote areas such as Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia in 1944, and continued her travels through Chile, Peru and Bolivia, Brazil and Ecuador. In all these countries she wrote stories published by European and American magazines.

Upon her return to Argentina she was commissioned in 1950 to do a story on General Juan Peron (1895-1974) and Evita Peron (1919-1952), who was then at the height of her power. That same year Life magazine published some of Freunds revealing photographs of Evita, provoking a diplomatic incident--Life was put on the blacklist in Argentina and Freund barely escaped the country with her negatives.

Later Career and Legacy
When invited to lecture in Mexico, Freund fell in love with Mexican culture, especially its art, and remained there for two years, becoming friends with painters Diego Rivera (1886–1957) and Frida Kahlo (1907-1954). However, when she wished to leave for the United States, she had problems with the American consulate. It was 1952 and the era of McCarthyism.

In 1947 Freund had signed a contract with Magnum Photos, beginning a seven-year association with the historic photographic news agency founded by Robert Capa (1913-1954) and Henri Cartier-Bresson (b. 1908). Freund had returned to Paris in 1953, now her permanent home, but by 1954, at the height of the cold war, Freund was blacklisted in America, declared an undesirable by the FBI, and pressured to break with Magnum in 1954.

Gisele Freund spent the rest of her life in France, living in a book-lined Paris home, writing memoirs, and working on numerous books. She became president of the French Federation of Creative Photographers in 1977, and in 1980 was the first woman to receive the Grand Prix National des Arts from France. Francois Mitterrand (1916-1996) appointed her an Officier des Arts et Lettres in 1982, and Chevalier de la Legion dÂ’ Honneur the following year. In 1991 she was the first photographer honored with a retrospective at the Musee National dart Moderne in Paris.

Gisele Freund died in Paris on March 31, 2000.

Good condition overall