Gisèle Freund (born Gisela Freund; 19 December 1908 – 31 March 2000) was a German-born French photographer and photojournalist, famous for her documentary photography and portraits of writers and artists. Her best-known book, Photographie et société (1974), is an expanded edition of her seminal 1936 dissertation. It was the first sociohistorical study on photography as a democratic medium of self-representation in the age of technological reproduction. With this first doctoral thesis on photography at the Sorbonne, she was one of the first women habilitated there.
Freund's major contributions to photography include using the Leica Camera (with its ability to house 35 mm film rolls with 36 frames) for documentary reportage and pioneering Kodachrome and Agfacolor positive film for colour portraits of writers and artists, which allowed her to develop a "uniquely candid portraiture style" that distinguishes her in 20th-century photography.
Politically left-leaning all her life, she became president of the French Union of Photographers in 1977. In 1981, she took the official portrait of French President François Mitterrand, and was made Officier des Arts et Lettres in 1982 and Chevalier de la Légion d'honneur, the highest decoration in France, in 1983. In 1985, she became the first photographer to be honored with a retrospective at the Musée national d'art moderne in Paris.
Freund was born in Schöneberg (Berlin) into a textile merchant family, her parents being Julius and Clara (née Dressel) Freund, a wealthy Jewish couple.
Her father, Julius Freund, was a keen art collector, Max Slevogt, Käthe Kollwitz and Max Liebermann were friends of the family. He had an interest in photography as well, like the work of Karl Blossfeldt, whose close-up studies explored the forms of natural objects. Freund's father bought Gisèle her first camera, a Voigtländer 6 × 9 in 1925 and a Leica camera as a present for her graduation in 1929.
In 1931, Freund studied sociology and art history at Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Breisgau, Germany; and in 1932 and 1933 she studied at the University of Frankfurt under Theodor W. Adorno, Karl Mannheim and Norbert Elias (also known as the Frankfurt School). At university she became an active member of a student socialist group and was determined to use photography as an integral part of her socialist practice. One of her first stories, shot on 1 May 1932, "shows a recent march of anti-fascist students" who had been "regularly attacked by Nazi groups".
In March 1933, some weeks after Adolf Hitler and his regime rose to power in Germany, Walter Benjamin fled to Paris. On 30 May, Gisèle followed him since she was both a socialist activist and a Jew. She escaped to Paris with her negatives strapped around her body to get them past the border guards. Gisèle and Walter Benjamin would continue their friendship in Paris, where Freund would famously photograph him reading at the National Library. They both studied and wrote about art in the 19th and 20th centuries as Freund continued her studies at the Sorbonne.
Although she was fascinated by portrait photography, Freund never had taken any serious portraits and at that point saw the camera merely as "an instrument for sociological research". André Malraux was the first to ask her to photograph him for an upcoming book, not a conventional portrait, but in a more candid fashion, that was trending in Paris at the time. So they stepped out onto the terrace. The photographs she took of him that day were used by publishers repeatedly the following decades.
Being acquainted now, Malraux invited Freund to document the First International Congress in Defence of Culture in Paris of 1935, where she was introduced to and subsequently photographed many of the notable French artists of her day.
Freund befriended the famed literary partners, Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare and Company, and Adrienne Monnier of Maison des Amis des Livres. In 1935, Monnier arranged a marriage of convenience for Freund with Pierre Blum so that Freund could obtain a residence permit to remain in France legally (they officially divorced after the war in 1948).
In 1936, while Sylvia Beach was visiting the United States, Freund moved into Monnier and Beach's shared apartment and they became intimates. When Beach returned, she ended her intimate relationship with Monnier yet maintained a strong friendship with both Monnier and Freund. Freund finished her Ph.D. in sociology and art at the Sorbonne in 1936, and published her doctoral dissertation as "La photographie en France au dix-neuvième siècle", under the La Maison des Amis des Livres imprint by Monnier.
Monnier "introduced [Freund] to the artists and writers who would prove her most captivating subjects." Later that year, Freund became internationally recognized with her photojournalistic piece "Northern England", which was published in Life magazine on 14 December 1936, and showed the effects of the Depression in England. No magazine in France could publish color photographs at that time, so Freund's work with Life—one of the first color mass magazines—would start a lifelong relationship between the photographer and magazine.
In 1938, Monnier suggested that Freund photograph James Joyce for his upcoming book, Finnegans Wake. Joyce, who disliked being photographed, invited Freund to his Paris flat for a private screening of her previous work. He was impressed enough by Freund's work to allow her to photograph him, and over a period of three days, she captured the most intimate portraits of Joyce during his time in Paris. During one of the sessions he hit his head on a light and cut his forehead. Joyce exclaimed, "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 photo-session her taxi crashed, which damaged her cameras and ruined the films. She told Joyce and being superstitious, Joyce was convinced that his cursing had caused the crash, so he invited Freund back to his home for a second round of photographs. Time magazine used one of these photos for its cover on 8 May 1939. The entire series of photographs would eventually be published in 1965 in James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years by Freund and V. B. Carleton and a preface by Simone de Beauvoir.
In 1939, after being "twice refused admission to Tavistock Square", Freund gained the confidence of Virginia Woolf and captured the iconic color photographs of the Woolfs on display in the English National Portrait Gallery. Woolf even "agreed to change her clothes to see which best suited the colour harmony and insisted on being photographed with Leonard (and their spaniel Pinka). In some of the prints, Woolf is pale and lined, in others smiling a little and more youthful. The background of fabrics and mural panels by Bell and Grant adds to the value of the images; this was the inner sanctum of the queen of Bloomsbury where parties were given and friends came to tea. Just over a year later the house was destroyed in The Blitz."
On 10 May 1940, the Wehrmacht started the Battle of France by invading the Benelux states.
On 10 June 1940, with the Nazi invasion of Paris looming, Freund escaped Paris to the free zone in the Dordogne. Her husband by convenience, Pierre, had been captured and deported to a prison camp. He was able to escape and met with Freund before going back to Paris to fight in the French Resistance. As the wife of an escaped prisoner, a Jew, and a socialist, Freund "feared for her life".
In February 1939, half a year before the beginning of World War II, her parents had finally fled Germany to Great Britain , and Nazi Germany confiscated all their belongings (Reich Flight Tax); they had to leave behind. Her father died two years later, and her mother, penniless, was forced to sell the art collection, that had already been moved to neutral Switzerland in 1933, shortly after Hitler's Machtergreifung.