While Gisele Freund’s birthdate is cited as either 1908 or 1912, it is certain she was born in the Schoneberg district of Berlin, Germany, to wealthy Jewish parents who had a passion for collecting art. Her father’s gift of a camera to the fifteen-year-old Gisèle set the course of her life. During her university years in Frankfurt, where she studied sociology, Freund took an active political stand again National Socialism. Forced to flee Germany in 1933, she landed in Paris with little more than a suitcase containing her camera and some photographic documentation of Nazi violence. At the Sorbonne her doctoral studies emphasized the history of nineteenth century French photography. Her friendship with Adrienne Monnier, the proprietress of La Maison des Amis des Livres bookshop (which published her dissertation) provided Freund with access to the literary elite of Paris.
The exigency to make a living led Freund to photography as a serious vocation. Life magazine published some of Freund’s early projects in the mid-1930s. Other significant commissions from that period include the dust jacket photographs for the first hard cover editions of Andre Malraux’s Man’s Fate (1935) and James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake (1939). In 1939, Freund had her first private showing at the Peggy Guggenheim Gallery in London. Though a naturalized French citizen, Freund fled occupied Paris in 1940, first to southern France and then to South America, where she continued her photographic assignments throughout the war. In 1947, she began a seven year association with Magnum, the photographic news agency established by Robert Capa and others, including Henri Cartier-Bresson. Freund’s first public exhibition was in 1975 in New York, at the Robert Schoelkopf Gallery. Three years later, Freund was awared the photokina Kulturpreis, and she was the first woman to receive the Grand Prix National des Arts in 1980. Gisele Freund died in Paris on April 1, 2000.
Along with her documentary reportage, Freund is best known for her photographic portraits, many of them in color which, she said, came closer to life, including studies of some of the greatest literary and artistic figures of the twentieth century. This list includes James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Andre Malraux, Jean Cocteau, Marcel Duchamp, and Henri Matisse. Before photographing her subjects, she worked to earn their confidence by establishing a rapport with them. Her ability to capture the "essence of beings through their expressions" earned Gisele Freund the reputation of being one of the world's greatest photographers.
From the guide to the Gisele Freund Papers, 1933-1990, (Washington State University Libraries Manuscripts, Archives, and Special Collections)
