Gisèle Freund

Gisèle Freund (born December 19, 1908, Berlin, Germany—died March 31, 2000, Paris, France) was a German-born French photographer noted especially for her portraits of artists and writers and for working in colour film in its nascency.

Freund was raised in an affluent Jewish household by parents who were intellectuals and art collectors. She was given a camera at age 12 after showing an early interest in photography. Her father gave her a Voigtlander 6 × 9 camera a few years later and the newly invented handheld Leica after that. Freund attended the Institute of Social Research of Frankfurt University to study sociology and art history, intending to pursue a career in sociology. While in school she became politically active and photographed anti-Nazi protests. She fled Germany in 1933 when the Nazis came to power and settled in Paris, where she began doctoral studies at the Sorbonne. While living and studying in Paris she forged a close friendship with German literary critic and thinker Walter Benjamin, with whom she spent time at the Bibliothèque Nationale. Benjamin encouraged her study of art and photography. In 1935 she traveled to England and photographed regions that were most affected by the Great Depression. That series of photos was published in Life magazine in 1936.

In 1935 Freund took the photo for which she would become best known, that of writer (and, later, statesman) André Malraux on a Paris rooftop. (In 1996 the French government used that image to create a postage stamp, famously editing out the cigarette dangling from Malraux’s lips.) When she was invited by Malraux to document the First International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, Freund began her career of taking photos of notable cultural figures. Some of her earliest subjects included Boris Pasternak, E.M. Forster, and Bertolt Brecht.

For her Ph.D. dissertation Freund wrote on French photography in the 19th century. The result was one of the earliest scholarly histories of photography. It was published in 1936 (facsimile 2011) as La Photographie en France au XIXe siècle by Paris bookseller Adrienne Monnier, who became an important mentor and contact for Freund, introducing her to many of Paris’s writers and other cultural figures. Through those introductions Freund found new subjects for her portraits. As a documentarian of people, she made a point of familiarizing herself with her subjects’ work and discussing it with them before taking their portraits, establishing an ease and intimacy that comes through in her photographs. In 1939 she took some of her most memorable photographs, many of them in colour, of Virginia Woolf, Leonard Woolf, James Joyce, Colette, George Bernard Shaw, T.S. Eliot, and Argentine writer and editor Victoria Ocampo, among many others. In May 1939 Freund’s portrait of Joyce appeared on the cover of Time magazine.

The Nazi invasion of France in 1940 forced Freund to flee again, first to southern France and then to Buenos Aires, where she reconnected with Ocampo, who became her link to the Latin American cultural circuit. She stayed through the end of the war, traveling throughout South America and photographing writers such as Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda. While in Argentina in 1950 she was asked to photograph first lady Eva Perón. With her trademark intimate style, Freund captured Perón with her dogs, getting her nails done, doing her hair, with her large hat collection, and giving handouts to the poor. The photographs, when published in Life, were seen by Eva and Juan Perón as ostentatious and embarassing, and, as a result, the magazine was banned in Argentina and Freund became persona non grata. Freund’s politics also got her into trouble. In 1947 Robert Capa had invited Freund to join Magnum Photos—a cooperative agency for freelance photographers that he had founded that year—but he dismissed her in 1954 because American Sen. Joseph McCarthy identified her as a communist. Before returning to Paris in 1952 she traveled to Mexico, where she photographed artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Freund continued to take pictures through the mid-1980s, even serving as Franƈois Mitterrand’s official photographer in 1981 after he was elected president of France. According to Freund, she eventually put down her camera so that she could spend more time reading.

Freund is recognized as one of the great portraitists of the 20th century. She also authored books, including James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years (1965), Le Monde et ma caméra (1970; The World in My Camera), Photographie et société (1974; Photography & Society), Trois jours avec Joyce (1982; Three Days with Joyce), and a memoir, Itinéraires (1985; Gisèle Freund: Photographer). She earned such awards as the Grand Prix National des Arts (1980) and was made an Officer of Arts and Letters in 1982 and Chevalier of the Legion of Honour in 1983.