Photographer Gisèle Freund (1908 – 2000) was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin, growing up around art (her father was a notable collector) and receiving a first rate education. She studied art history and sociology at the University of Freiburg and then Frankfurt, becoming acquainted with the Frankfurt School folks around Adorno, friends with Walter Benjamin, portraitist of Berthold Brecht, and engaged in antifascist student organizations.

She barely made it to France in 1933, answering the threatening questions of the police patrolling the train “if they had ever heard someone Jewish being called Gisela,” a classic German name, and handing over her camera that she had intuitively emptied of film in the train’s loo.

She escaped with few funds, but a lot of negatives depicting mass demonstrations and violence by the Nazis against leftist protests which introduced her as a photographer to an ever widening circle of friends and aquaintances in the literary and publishing circles in Paris. Her works can now be found at the Washington State University Libraries Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections, depicting a veritable Who’s Who of (mostly) European intellectuals.

Prints include numerous portraits of: Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Andre Malraux, Simone de Beauvoir, Man Ray, W.H. Auden, Samuel Beckett, Andre Breton, Andre Gide, Colette, Marcel Duchamp, Paul Eluard, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau, Henri Matisse, T.S. Eliot, Leonard Woolf, Henri Michaux, David Siqueiros, Andrienne Monnier, Sylvia Beach, Max Ernst, G.B. Shaw, J.B. Priestley, Diego Rivera, Henry Moore, Herman Hesse, Stephen Spender, Christopher Isherwood, Paul Valery, Elsa Triolet, Simone De Beauvoir, Pierre Bonnard, Vita Sackville-West, Georges Mathieu, Ivan Illich, Aleksandr Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, Marguerite Yourcenar, John Steinbeck, Philippe Soupault, Eugene Ionesco, Le Corbusier, Samuel Beckett, Jose Clemente Orosco, Iris Murdoch, Ivy Compton Burnett, Rosamund Lehmann, Christopher Fry. 1933-1974  She took the official photograph at the presidential inauguration of Socialist Francois Mitterrand in 1981.

Here are some of the images:

Previous travels to Paris had already brought friendship with some of the surrealists, more doors opened after she became friends and then lovers (she was bi-sexual) with the famous bookstore owner Adrienne Monnier, which left the latter’s previous partner, Sylvia Beach, in the dust. Monnier published her doctoral thesis (part of the book I reviewed yesterday,) made the connections to the literary illuminati, and helped to find a marriage of convenience with a resistance fighter so that Freund could stay in France.

Until she couldn’t. In 1940 she had to flee Paris, eventually traveling to South America, all the while being published by major publications like Life Magazine, Time Magazine, Paris-Match and Magnum, starting a year after its founding, and being written out of its history when she became politically risky. Argentina threw her out of the country after she photographed Evita Perón in heaps of her jewels and with stashes of accumulated riches. She found a harbor in Mexico City, became friends with Diego Riviera and Frida Kahlo and their circle, and was banned from entry to the US until the 1970s (!) because of her leftists associates.

She was described as a difficult person, temperamental, but I am in awe of the independence, the power to take risks and explore while forced to relocate under threat, and the flexibility to adapt to ever changing conditions. She also embraced color photography as one of the first influential photographers, scorned by many in the male establishment.

Postwar return to France saw her fame rise, details found here in an obituary that lamented, 20 years ago, that her work had been hidden from history for too long.

That is no longer true, and brings me to the question that reading her book and articles about her raised for me. How do you understand a person and feel free to interpret her motives for her work, when you can no longer talk to her? It is of course a task for many a biographer, but looking at photographs and interpreting them to infer the motivations of the photographer strikes me as difficult, particularly when their own recorded words stand in contrast to your interpretations.

Let me explain with an example, typical for many. A scholar of photographers in exile argues

“that exile by fascist regimes prompted certain European photographers to resort to human figuration in order to reconsider the possibilities of historical subjectivity at its moment of crisis…. Gisèle Freund, the color portraitist of the interwar French cultural luminaries, made a volte-face from the portrayal of the collective subject in the political demonstrations in pre-exile Frankfurt into the individual faces of the French intellectuals after her exile in Paris…led them to instrumentalize the photographic medium not only to address the aftermath of the European avant-garde—especially the end of its utopian quest to envision political collectives through human figuration—but also to measure and critique the new American mass culture and subjectivity.”

Ok, I have no clue what historical subjectivity is supposed to mean. Not for want of trying, but the literature explaining it is impenetrable for this aging brain. My bad. I do know, though, that Freund never gave up on photographing collective subjects, even during exile, as can be seen in work documenting the British poor, and political movements and working conditions all over the South American sub-continent in her years of exile. Never mind, that she also portrayed individual people with a passion pre-exile.

I have watched interviews with the photographer herself speaking late in life about her intentions. For one, being hired for portraits in the 1930s meant a means of economic survival (the print media were happy to display pictures of the rich and famous.) Shifting to color made her feel she could capture more life-like impressions, serving her goal to “familiarize strangers with each other, potentially decreasing enmity among them.” The close encounters with people also opened avenues for what she thought most important in all of the world: friendship and love.

The interview below is, alas, available only in German.

It ends with a comment that I translated here:

“I believed for many years that you could change the world with photography. I later realized that was an error. People used my photos to pursue their ideologies and I understood that photography lies even though people assume it tells the truth.”

She abandoned photography, her life’s passion, in 1980, a full 20 years before her death of a heart attack in the year 2000.

Photographs, selected for the color that Freund so cherished, are from Coyoacán, Mexico City, the neighborhood where Frida Kahlo, who was photographed extensively by Freund, lived. The blue house is now a museum – I wrote about Fridamania here.

And here we go down memory lane for my own youth…