show that substantially influenced modern photo-
graphy in France. Its impact can be seen in the
works of Ilse Bing, Pierre Boucher, Brassaı ̈, Henri
Cartier-Bresson, Rene ́Jacques, Pierre Jahan, Fran-
c ̧ois Kollar, Roger Parry, Roger Schall, Maurice
Tabard, and Rene ́Zuber. Krull is no less important
than Alexandr Rodchenko from the USSR or
Albert Renger-Patzsch from Germany.
Born in 1897, Germaine Krull came to know
much of Europe because her parents moved the
family so many times during her childhood. Her
independent-minded father schooled her at home
until her parents divorced in 1912. In 1915, she
applied to enter university but was unsuccessful
because she lacked a high school diploma. She then
applied to a school of commercial photography in
Munich that was still heavily influenced by German-
American Pictorialist Frank Eugene, who had taught
there until 1913. After completing her studies, she
worked as a portrait photographer from her own
studio. In her nudes and in photographs that she
published in 1918 along with photographs by Josef
Pe ́csi and Wanda von Debschitz-Kunowski, she fol-
lowed pictorial conventions.
In the intellectual circles of Munich, Krull had
close contact with liberal and left-wing thinkers. By
1919, she had become attracted to revolutionary
communism in the Soviet Republic, and in 1921,
she participated in the Third World Congress of the
Communist International in Moscow, though she did
not photograph any of the political events. In 1923,
sheopenedastudioinBerlinwithKurtHu ̈bschmann
(alias Kurt Hutton), who matched her photographic
ambitions and met her demanding standards. The
two created a number of nude series over the next
few years. In a sequence of lascivious photographs of
nude couples from 1924 titled ‘‘Les Amies,’’ Krull
tended toward an unencumbered improvisation
(although the subjects were posed) that created a
distance from Pictorialism that distinguishes her
later work. At this time she also began shooting street
photography, though few of these photographs made
their way into the press.
In 1923, she met the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens.
In 1925, she moved with him to Amsterdam, and
there she came into contact with the Dutch avant-
garde movement that arose around the journali10.
Together with Ivens, who at the time was very much
under the influence of Soviet filmmaker Sergei
Eisenstein, Krull tried stylistic innovations in film
and photography. In 1925, this resulted in urban
landscape portraits of Antwerp, Rotterdam, and
Amsterdam from both a bird’s-eye and a worm’s-
eye view. Her photographs of the docks were pio-
neering and one of the high points of her work.
Krull found one of her most important subjects
in industrial complexes, where she photographed
smokestacks, cranes, ship masts, and iron bridges.
The industrial structures in these photographs often
melt into confusing geometric patterns. Her photo-
graphy never indulged in compositional finesse; on
the contrary, her photographs seem to capture the
momentary and the careless. Krull emphasizes fall-
ing lines and creates confusion by foreshortening
perspective, layering the depth of certain image
surfaces, focusing on obscuring details, and altering
the horizon line. She captures the speed of the per-
petually moving eye, similar to the way La ́szlo ́
Moholy-Nagy did at the time, but without his ten-
dency toward constructivist abstraction. She was
not interested in his theories about photography,
but, like him, she sought to capture the new theme
of the city in a subjective form of perception.
In 1928, she published her masterpiece,Me ́tal.It
contains photographs taken after 1923 of machines
and industrial structures from various locations. In
1926, Krull moved to Paris, where she quickly made
contact with progressive artists, most notably Eli
Lotar in 1927, for whom she left Ivens. Critical to
her increasing fame was Robert Delaunay, who
exhibited her work along with his own at the
Salon d’Automne in 1927. If Krull’s description
corresponds to actual facts (something not yet con-
firmed), then this was the very first avant-garde
photography exhibit in France. A photo series of
the Eiffel Tower that she made in 1927 was enor-
mously successful; the images reappeared years
later in illustrated books and photography antholo-
gies. They were also integrated intoMe ́tal.
This paean of a book foregrounds the details of
machinery to the point where their function as tech-
nology is unrecognizable, with double exposures
obscuring them even further; she makes them
appear like animated creatures. Krull’s photo-
graphs are more expressive and more disturbing,
and at the same time more casual, than what the
Neue Sachlichkeit or‘‘New Objectivity’’ of the time
had to offer. Similar garish effects were prominent
in Krull’s works from her time in Amsterdam and
Paris. Her aim was an alienation effect that was half
expressionistic, half surreal, and played with light
and shadow to have an impact of the fantastic on
the objects photographed. In visualizing the world
of machines, she put into play these effects, and out
of the denaturalized world of industrial wonders
there arose images filled with pathos. When she
took photographs of everyday subjects, the same
effects gave the objects a poetic meta-existence.
Around 1930, with the same style, she photo-
graphed Parisian boulevards, arcades, and marketKRULL, GERMAINE