Gisèle friend

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Gisèle Freund, Paris 1974

Gisèle Freund (born Gisela Freund ; born December 19, 1908 in Schöneberg (now Berlin ), † March 31, 2000 in Paris ) was a Franco-German photographer and photo historian.

Life

She grew up in a wealthy Jewish family in the Bavarian quarter of Schöneberg. Her father, the art collector Julius Freund , awakened her understanding of images at an early age and gave the amateur photographer a Leica as a present at school . Although she initially wanted to go to Heidelberg to study after graduating from high school , it never happened because her parents, unlike her brother's, considered studying in a place that was regarded as overly sophisticated as inadvisable. She therefore studied sociology from 1929 in Freiburg im Breisgau , then from the winter semester 1929/30 with Karl Mannheim in Frankfurt am Main , who had also left Heidelberg at that time. At the neighboring Institute for Social Research , she also took part in Max Horkheimer's seminars . As a member of the Red Student Group , she was close to the KPD .

Her mentor Norbert Elias , then Karl Mannheim's assistant , advised her to investigate the beginnings of photography in France in a sociological-aesthetic doctoral thesis. From 1931 onwards she therefore stayed mainly in Paris for research. When the Jewish professors in Germany were retired by National Socialist law in April 1933 and Karl Mannheim emigrated to London , Freund also decided to emigrate and finished her dissertation in Paris .

She received significant support from the bookseller and writer Adrienne Monnier , with whom she had a very close friendship. Monnier translated the doctoral thesis into French and published it for a doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1936 in the publishing house of her bookstore. La Photographie en France au dix-neuvième siecle was the first attempt to explain the emergence of portrait photography materialistically . The work is a milestone in the exploration of modern visual culture. The German original was first published in 1968 under the title Photography and Civil Society. An art-sociological study .

Freund began to work as a photojournalist while still a student . Her first important reportage described the life of the unemployed in the northern industrial area of ​​England and appeared in Weekly Illustrated in 1935 , and a year later as a reprint in the newly founded Life . In the context of a report on the Moscow-controlled International Writers' Congress , which took place in Paris in 1935, she succeeded in creating a portrait of André Malraux , which, through its snapshot-like casualness and graphic brilliance, made a romantic-revolutionary hero of the time an icon.

When Agfacolor slide film came onto the market in France in 1938 , Freund began to collect a collection of color portraits of writers. She photographed the authors, most of whom she had met through Monnier, in lamplight portrait sessions. This gave the pictures a calm aesthetic unity that was reminiscent of the conception of the Galerie contemporaine by Nadar and other photographers of the Second Empire . In about a year and a half, she took up over eighty writers in Paris and London, many of whom were later counted among the most important authors of the twentieth century: Aragon , Breton , Benjamin , Cocteau , Colette , Eliot , Éluard , Gide , Joyce , Koestler , Montherlant , Rolland , Shaw , Susana Soca , Valéry , Wilder , Woolf , Zweig u. a.

This unique work of color portraits was only published many years after the Second World War and is what establishes Freund's fame as a portraitist of the spirit today. In some cases - Joyce, Malraux and Woolf - Freund's portrait has entered the public consciousness so strongly that it canonically stand for the figure itself. When François Mitterrand became French President in 1981, he knew this ancestral gallery and asked Freund to take his official portrait. Like the writers of yore, she put him in the lamplight. A year later she was awarded the order of the Légion d'honneur and received her French identity card.

Shortly before the German troops marched into Paris in 1940, Freund fled to the Lot department and spent a year with farmers in the free zone. In 1936 she married Pierre Blum, the friend of a cousin of Adrienne Monnier, to become a French citizen. But she did not doubt that her life was in danger in occupied France. With the help of the wealthy Argentine writer Victoria Ocampo , she managed to escape to Buenos Aires . This city remained their base of life until the end of the war. The marriage with Blum was divorced by mutual agreement in 1948.

The forced South American years were a happy and productive time for Freund. She traveled through Patagonia and took photos there and in the Andean countries with the curiosity of an ethnographer . In 1945 in Chile , she was an assistant director and still photographer in a French drama troupe that made the feature film La Fruta mordida under the direction of Jacques Rémy . When Robert Capa and other former war photographers founded the Magnum photo agency in 1947 , Freund became an associate member. She lived mostly in Mexico City , belonged to the circle of friends around Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera and took photos all over Central and South America.

Magnum sold her reports and portraits to magazines internationally, including a series of pictures about Evita Perón in 1950 , which is one of her best journalistic works. A little later there was a break with the agency. From 1952, Freund worked from Paris and expanded her portrait collection to include writers from the post-war period: Beauvoir and Sartre , Beckett , Duras , Ionesco , Leiris , Michaux , Sarraute and others. a. were now captured by her in a discreet, observational style and mostly in black and white. Her active time as a photographer ended in the mid-sixties. She now lived on her extensive archive of portraits, which magazines, book publishers and television used.

A first large solo exhibition of her portraits was shown in 1968 in the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris . Two years later, Freund published an autobiography Le Monde et ma caméra , which began with the description of her dramatic escape on the night train from Hitler's Germany. This began the creation of legends about her person, which she nourished with many interviews during the years of her fame. The discovery of her work and her particular popularity in Germany began in the mid-1970s, parallel to the women's movement and the separation of photography and photo art by the art business. When the documenta in Kassel in 1977 showed a portfolio made for the art trade with ten of her early color portraits, the photographer Freund had become a photo artist.

Gisèle Freund's tombstone on the Cimetière Montparnasse

All 180 pictures from a Freund retrospective at the Sidney Janis Gallery in New York were acquired by the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson in 1979 . Photo books and several television films made her life and work known primarily in France and Germany. In 1991, at the height of its fame, the Center Georges-Pompidou Freund hosted a major retrospective which was attended by 400,000 people. The 250 works from this show were donated to the collection of the Musée National d'Art Moderne as a gift from Freund . In the 1990s she worked as a mentor to the young Jessica Backhaus .

On March 31, 2000, Gisèle Freund died of heart failure in Paris at the age of 91. Her grave is on the Cimetière Montparnasse in Paris. She has no offspring. The Institut Mémoires de l'édition contemporaine (IMEC) in Saint-Germain la Blanche-Herbe owns her estate and is responsible for the exploitation rights to her work.

Services

Gisèle Freund is now considered an artist who made an impact through her photographs and her biography. She has always tied her work to the narrative of her eventful life, to her love for literature and the writers, to her often radical views. The woman with the camera - as one of her last books was called - was one of the great women of the twentieth century. Her art-sociological study Photography and Bourgeois Society thematizes the connections between French portrait photography and the rise of the bourgeoisie and the petty bourgeoisie based on a materialistic social theory and had a lasting influence on the critical analysis of photography. She particularly criticizes the medium's pseudo-objectivity.

Works

Solo exhibitions

Monographs

  • 1936: La Photographie en France au dix-neuvième siècle. Paris
  • 1954: Mexique Précolombien. Neuchâtel
  • 1965: James Joyce in Paris . new York
  • 1968: Au pays des visages 1938–1968. Paris (exhibition catalog)
  • 1968: Photography and civil society. Munich (German edition from * 1936)
  • 1970: Le Monde et ma caméra. Paris
  • 1974: Photography et société. Paris (completely modified and expanded version from * 1968)
  • 1975: The World In My Camera. New York (English edition from * 1970 expanded to include many illustrations)
  • 1976: Photography and Society. Munich (German edition from * 1974; several editions and editions)
  • 1977: Photographs 1932–1977. Bonn (exhibition catalog)
  • 1977: Mémoires de l'œil. Paris (German edition: Memoirs of the Eye. Frankfurt am Main 1977)
  • 1982: Trois jours avec Joyce. Paris (German edition: Three days with James Joyce. Frankfurt am Main 1983)
  • 1985: photographs. Munich (until today the authoritative monograph; several editions and English and French licensed editions)
  • 1988: Gisèle Freund. Berlin (exhibition catalog; several different editions)
  • 1989: portraits of writers and artists. Munich
  • 1991: Catalog de l'œuvre photographique Gisèle Freund. Paris (exhibition catalog)
  • 1992: The woman with the camera. Munich (also as exhibition catalog Hamburg)
  • 1992: Gisèle Freund portrait. Entretiens avec Rauda Jamis. Paris (German edition: Conversations with Rauda Jamis. Munich 1993)
  • 1994: Two reports. Braunschweig (exhibition catalog)
  • 1995: Photographs for May 1st, 1932. Frankfurt am Main (exhibition catalog. All photos were taken before 1932)
  • 1996: Berlin-Frankfurt-Paris. Photographs 1929–1962. Berlin (exhibition catalog)
  • 1996: Faces of Language. Writer around Adrienne Monnier. Photographs between 1935 and 1940. Hanover (exhibition catalog)
  • 1996: Malraux sous le regard de Gisèle Freund. Paris (exhibition catalog)
  • 2001: en face. Gisèle Freund photographed by Tom Fecht. Berlin (exhibition catalog)

Audio book

  • 2000: A life for the Leica. Gisèle Freund in conversation. o. O. (SWR broadcast from 1983)

Others

In 2015, the University of Frankfurt am Main named a place on the Westend campus after Gisèle Freund.

literature

Web links

Commons : Gisèle Freund  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ lieselotte steinbrügge: I just risked a five . In: The daily newspaper: taz . December 22, 1990, ISSN  0931-9085 , p. 13–14 ( taz.de [accessed April 1, 2020]).
  2. ↑ Sigrun Brox: Pictures are shots in the brain: the picture in advertising photography in the 90s . On www.verlag-ludwig.de, 2003, ISBN 3-933598-73-7 , p. 40.
  3. ↑ Gisèle Freund. Photographic scenes and portraits. Exhibition, May 23 to August 10, 2014. Akademie der Künste (Berlin), accessed on May 18, 2014 .
  4. ^ Official Journal for Frankfurt am Main. No. 17/2015, p. 426 f.
personal data
SURNAME Friend, Gisèle
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Franco-German photographer and photo historian
DATE OF BIRTH December 19, 1908
PLACE OF BIRTH Schöneberg
DATE OF DEATH March 31, 2000
Place of death Paris
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on September 7, 2005 .