Paris in July, 2024 - Giséle Freund, photographer

Blipping through channels on my TV, I came upon a documentary of Gisèle Freund (1908-2000, and born Gisela Freund) a German-French photographer and photo journalist. It was a very interesting documentary of an interesting and fascinating woman. Making her way in a mainly male world, she became a successful entrepreneur and artist. It is intriguing to discover people like her, people you have never heard of, and just like that … they pop up one day. I thought this would be a suitable post for Paris in July. Her connections are so close to all the literary characters we associate with Paris at the time.

Freund was born in Germany but had to leave the country in the beginning of the 1930s, and she went to Paris. She was even then famous for her realistic photos of people in different situations of life. Later in life she became famous for her portraits of writers and artists.

She studied sociology and her best-known book Photographie et société (1974) is based on her 1936 dissertation.” (Wikipedia) She was also ahead of her time when it came to using, the then, modern technology. She used a Leica camera which had film rolls with 36 frames. Mainly for her work with documentary reportages and pioneering. For the portraits of writers and artists, she used Kodachrome and Agfa colour positive film. Does this not bring back memories from before the digital world we live in these days? This seems to have made it possible for her to develop a “uniquely candid portraiture style” that made her stand out at the time. She spent many years living abroad to document people in other parts of the world.

Politically she was leaning towards the left and she became president of the French Union of Photographers in 1977. The 1981 official portrait of President François Mitterrand was taken by her. In 1982 she was made Officer des Arts et Lettres and Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur in 1983. That was not all, for in 1985, she became the first photographer to be honoured with a retrospective at the Musée national d'art moderne in Paris.

Paris

Before Paris Freund had never done portraits. Her opening to these kind of photos was a request from French novelist and art theorist André Malraux. He wanted her to take a photo for an upcoming book, but not a photo in the traditional sense, but in a more candid fashion. This was the beginning of her career as a portrait photographer. At this time she befriended Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier.

That led to Freund taking James Joyce’s photo for his upcoming book Finnegan’s Wake. It seems Joyce did not like to be photographed, but nevertheless invited Freund to his flat looking into her earlier work. He was so impressed that during three days Freund had access to the author. He got tired of posing and cried: ”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."[Right after the session the taxi that Freund went with crashed and her photos were damaged. Joyce, it seems, was superstitious and thought that his cursing had cause the crash. Freund was once again invited into his home and could take another set of photos. One of the photos was used by Time magazine for its cover on 8 May 1939.

There are so much more to this lady that I can tell of here. If you are interested the documentary was made by Arte France Complices Films, and there are a lot to read about her on the net.