Two portraits of her life as a scholar, feminist and photographer.
 Gisele Freund displays one of her photographs of writer Vita Sackville West in her study. This photograph was taken in 1992 for the London Times. reprinted from the New York Times, April 1, 2000
PARIS, March 31 -- Gisele Freund, the German-born photographer who was best known for her portraits of France's literary elite and was a founding member of Magnum Photo Agency, died today in Paris. She was 91. Ms. Freund was one of Europe's most prominent photographers and a pillar among French feminist intellectuals after fleeing Nazi Germany and settling in Paris in the 1930's. In the course of her long career, she went on about 80 photographic assignments around the world, mainly for Time and Life. But she is most noted for being in a lot of places with a lot of famous people. She captured a windblown Andre Malraux on a Paris rooftop, Boris Pasternak, Aldous Huxley and Andre Gide at a congress for the defense of culture; Walter Benjamin sitting on a bench in the Bibliotheque Nationale; Vladimir Nabokov, Michel Leiris, Henri Michaux and Jean Paulhan in the editorial offices of the magazine Mesures and James Joyce playing the piano for his son, Giorgio. She specialized in conveying the attitude of her subjects. She focused on hands, body posture and clothing. Reviewing an exhibition of her life's work in 1979, Hilton Kramer wrote in The New York Times that she excelled in "brilliant documentation rather than originality." In a 1996 interview, Ms. Freund said she read her subjects' work and often spent hours discussing their books with them before taking a portrait. "This was essential to gaining their confidence," she said of Sartre, de Beauvoir, Malraux and Breton. "I tell many young photographers to do the same thing, but so often they don't want to read about their subjects, they just want to take pictures. Born in Berlin in 1908 to wealthy Jewish parents who collected art, Ms. Freund was given her first camera at the age of 12. As a university student studying sociology in Frankfurt, she became a political activist protesting the rise of Hitler's National Socialism. In 1933 she fled Germany, escaping just as the police were about to arrest her. She arrived in Paris carrying only a small suitcase, a camera and some film recording the early stages of Nazi violence. She used her camera to make a living. But what began as economic necessity rapidly developed into a serious vocation. Although still living the life of a refugee who had become stateless, by 1936 she had scored a double triumph. Her dissertation was published as a book by Adrienne Monnier, the Paris bookseller who stood at the center of French literary life in the period between the two world wars. And the first of her picture stories was published by the new Life magazine. Ms. Monnier, whom Ms. Freund met while browsing in her Left Bank bookshop, became her lifelong mentor and companion, introducing her to the Parisian intellectual set and encouraging her to pursue photography. Her use of color clashed with the prevailing style of retouched black-and-white studio portraits, but she persevered, saying that color was "closer to life." The Nazi invasion of France in 1940 interrupted her career and she fled again, first to southern France and then to Argentina, where she worked until the war's end. In later years Ms. Freund became well known in her adopted France, winning the National Grand Prize for Photography in 1980. She took the official photograph of François Mitterrand, a Socialist, at his presidential inauguration in 1981. But she gave up photography in the mid-1980's, saying she wanted to spend her time reading. Her modest Paris apartment did not have a single photograph on the walls, but there were piles of books. In a statement, President Jacques Chirac praised her today as "one of the world's greatest photographers." "She was able, better than anyone, to reveal the essence of beings through their expressions," he said. Prime Minister Lionel Jospin hailed Ms. Freund as an "unparalleled sociologist and reporter who traveled the world with a generous and lucid approach to places and events faraway." Her agent, Nina Beskow, said that Ms. Freund had been briefly married "for paper reasons." There were no immediate survivors. Ms. Freund's portrait of Malraux on the rooftop -- wrapped in a trench coat with a cigarette dangling from his mouth -- is among her most best-known photographs. |
reprinted from the London Times, April 1, 2000 "WHEN you do not like human beings, you cannot make good portraits." From Colette busy writing, to the deep, sad eyes of Virginia Woolf and the fatigue of James Joyce in his red dressing gown, this adoptive Frenchwoman frequented and recorded many of the great cultural figures of the interwar years and beyond. Blessed with a gift for friendship, she was a vigorous champion of the art of photography, although too modest to style herself as anything other than a "photojournalist". Freund was born into a comfortable middle-class Jewish family living near Berlin. Her father, an assiduous collector of art, introduced her to photography by showing her Karl Blossfeldt's remarkable studies of plants, and bought her a Leica when she passed her school leaving certicate. With their mobility and capacity for 36 shots without reloading, these small new cameras were revolutionising the art of photography. Freund's own interest in such changes was reflected by her decision to prepare a sociology thesis on the effects of photography on the art of the portrait. In this she was encouraged by her teacher Norbert Elias, one of the members of the seminal Frankfurt School along with Theodor Adorno and Karl Mannheim, under whom she also studied. With the coming to power of the Nazis in 1933, Freund fled Frankfurt for Paris, taking her camera with her. She enrolled at the Sorbonne to continue her thesis and began to forge links with such figures as Jean Paulhan and his fellow exile Walter Benjamin, the author of A Little History of Photography and one of the few companion spirits to take an interest in a medium whose existence academics barely even acknowledged at the time: "People thought I was a madwoman," Freund would recall. She was awarded her PhD in 1936. By then, though, she was already an established photographer and had decided to drop sociology. In 1935 she had produced what is considered her finest piece of photojournalism, a report on unemployment in the North of England. She had also done the first of her many famous portraits, the one of the romantic-looking revolutionary Andre Malraux, winner of the Prix Goncourt for La Condition humaine. Her portraits were direct, without indulgence but always respectfully engaged with their subject - a long way from the cosmetic heightening which was characteristic of the studio style of the day. In 1939 Monnier and Freund invited the sitters to see their portraits projected in giant format on the walls of the bookshop. "There was Romains, Breton, Sartre," she recalled. "They all thought it was marvellous, except for their own faces." With the outbreak of war, Freund again found herself fleeing, this time to Argentina at the intercession of Malraux ("we must save Gisele") and with the financial support of the rich Argentinean Victoria Ocampo, editor of the South American literary magazine Sur. Quickly breaking away from local high society, Freund headed south to produce a remarkable series of photographs of Tierra del Fuego, to be followed a few years later by portraits of Eva Peron, then at the height of her fame. Fascinated as she was by Mexico, she nevertheless decided to return in 1952 to Paris, where she was invited to join Magnum by Robert Capa. The experience ended badly, however. Fearing for the future of his agency in America, Capa dismissed her in 1954 because she was on the McCarthy blacklist and had been refused entry into the country. Though the incident hurt, she continued working successfully on her portraits and journalism. In 1974 she published Photography and Society, a very clear historical and sociological survey which remains a classic introduction. This is no doubt the best known of her nine books, which include a number of autobiographical volumes and albums as well as a memoir of Joyce, Three Days with Joyce (1983). By now very much an adoptive Frenchwoman, Freund was given a retrospective at the Paris Musee d'Art Moderne in 1968. In 1981 she was asked to take what, in France at least, is no doubt her best known if most anonymous work: the official presidential photograph of François Mitterrand which decorated French town halls and official buildings for nearly a decade and a half. Gisele Freund stopped taking photographs in the 1980s to devote herself to that other great passion expressed in the subjects and sensibility of her portraits: reading. At her home of forty years near Rue Daguerre, Paris, the walls were covered with books, not photographs. |
