Portraits of Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, Walter Benjamin & Other Literary Legends by Gisèle Freund
“Gisèle Freund, the German-born photographer who died in 2000 at 91, is both famous and not famous enough,” writes Katherine Knorr in the New York Times.
“She was sometimes chagrined to be best known for some of her
portraits,” whose luminary subjects included artists, film stars, and
writers.
At the top, we have Freund’s 1938 shot of James Joyce with his
grandson in Paris. Just below, her photograph of a pensive Walter
Benjamin from that same year.
At the bottom, her 1939 portrait of a
smoking Virginia Woolf. (French novelist, theorist and, Minister for
Cultural Affairs André Malraux also sported a cigarette in his 1935 portrait by Freund, an image which made it to a postage stamp
in 1996, though with his smoke carefully removed.) Former President
Jacques Chirac publicly praised Freund’s ability to “reveal the essence
of beings through their expressions.” In Woolf’s case, Freund produced
the being in question’s first-ever color portrait.
“[Freund] was an early adapter to color, in 1938, and her first exhibition was in fact a projection of color portraits given in Monnier’s book shop,”
Knorr writes. She goes on to describe another exhibition, in 2011, that
“similarly projects the portraits within its mock bookshop, turning the
show into a guessing game since some of those photographed have
enormously famous faces,” while others “are a lot of French
intellectuals that most young French people today would not recognize.”
While we naturally assume that you, as an Open Culture reader, recognize
a fair few more French intellectuals than the average gallery-goer, we
can’t help but focus on the fact that so many of the writers of whom
Freund’s eye saw the definitive images — not just Joyce, Benjamin, and
Woolf, but Beckett, Eliot, Hesse,
the list goes on — became the defining writers of their era.
Freund
herself had just one question: “Explain to me why writers want to be
photographed like stars,” she wrote, “and the latter like writers.”
Images by Freund have been collected in the book, Gisèle Freund: Photographs & Memoirs. You can also visit the Freund website to view a collection of portraits.
via A Piece of Monologue
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Colin Marshall hosts and produces Notebook on Cities and Culture and writes essays on literature, film, cities, Asia, and aesthetics. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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