GISE
`
LE FREUND
French
Gise`le Freund’s portrait of Virginia Woolf (1939),
taken a few weeks before the novelist’s suicide,
captures the patient attention and poignant sincer-
ity that characterizes her photographic eye. It is
interesting, then, that Freund’s decision to become
a photographer arose out of economic necessity.
Her portraits of some of modernism’s most cele-
brated figures have become canonical images,
despite the fact that Freund purposely downplayed
her aesthetic role, having always considered herself
a documenter rather than an artist. Because of her
fascination with everyday human experience, Fre-
und’s oeuvre includes such wide-ranging work as
travel reportage, documentation of poverty and
political life, and even a study of mediums and
palm readers. Arguably, the color portraits taken
in the 1930s and 1940s are Freund’s most striking
work. Her experimentation with Kodachrome and
35 mm Agfacolor, combined with her uniquely can-
did portraiture style, would help distinguish her
work from the era’s other proficient photograph-
ers and guarantee her role as an invaluable witness
to and recorder of a most creative and product-
ive generation.
As a Jew and a Socialist, Freund was forced to
flee Germany in 1933 as the Nazi violence she was
documenting had become a threat to her personal
safety. Freund arrived in Paris with an incomplete
dissertation and the Leica her father had given her
when she was 15. Befriending Adrienne Monnier,
the proprietress ofLa Maison des Amis des Livres
bookshop, was personally and professionally trans-
formative for Freund, as Monnier would eventually
publish the completed dissertation and introduce
Freund to the artists and writers who would prove
her most captivating subjects. Monnier would
remain a lifelong mentor and companion.
While completing her doctorate in sociology at
the Sorbonne, Freund was steadily establishing
herself as an adept photographer. Her views from
Notre Dame (1933) and the publication of a photo-
essay in the first year ofLifemagazine (1936) were
the beginning of a formidable career in documen-
tary and portrait photography. Because no French
magazine could process color,Life’s publication of
Freund’s piece on poverty in northern England
was a singular opportunity that would turn into a
lifelong collaborative alliance. Her first official
assignment, given to her by the director of the
Bibliothe`que nationale de France, was to photo-
graph all the libraries in Paris for the 1937 World’s
Fair.Vumagazine featured this commission, whose
affectionate analysis of the eccentric library pat-
rons was just the beginning of Freund’s charac-
teristic scrutiny of her subjects’ bodies, clothing,
and posture.
Freund’s unwillingness to retouch photographs
led her to focus upon artists and writers, whom she
assumed were less concerned with physical perfec-
tion. Though many were apparently quite disap-
pointed with their portraits, Freund continued to
photograph the era’s most celebrated artists and
writers, including Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp,
Henri Matisse, Andre ́Gide, Simone de Beauvoir,
Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Colette, and
Walter Benjamin. Her photographs for the dust-
jacket of Andre ́Malraux’sMan’s Fate(1939) and
James Joyce’sFinnegan’s Wake(1939) were among
her most prestigious commissions. Freund’s precise
composition and traditionally posed subjects offer
an interesting counterpoint to the work’s intense
intimacy and technologically advanced use of
color. The result of this implicit tension is a gallery
of faces whose graphically featured skin tones and
eye color create pictures quite distinct from the
more widely reproduced black and white photo-
graphs of her contemporaries.
Freund fled France in 1941 and eventually tra-
veled to Buenos Aires where she would remain for
the duration of the war. In South America, Freund
worked as an assistant film producer and a photo-
journalist, completing assignments in Argentina,
Chile, Ecuador, and Uruguay.
Returning to Europe for a brief time in 1946,
Freund, like many other photographers, visited the
post-liberation concentration camps. Once there,
however, Freund felt that she could best serve the
efforts by identifying the bodies of former acquain-
tances rather than by documenting Nazi atrocities.
In 1948, Freund joined Magnum Photos, Robert
Capa’s photographers’ collaborative, for which she
would become the Latin American contributor. ItFREUND, GISE`LE