Masters of Photography - Gisèle Freund

Video Title :	Masters of Photography - Gisèle Freund
Description :	Photography © The Estate of Gisele Freund Some portraits © National Portrait Gallery http://www.npg.org.uk/live/search/person.asp?LinkID=mp08041role=art Gisèle Freund (November 19, 1908 - March 31, 2000) was a German-born French photographer, famous for her documentary photographs and portraits of writers and artists. http://www.temple.edu/photo/photographers/gisele/gisele.htm Reprinted from London Times, April 1, 2000 (highlights) 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. 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 With the coming to power of the Nazis in 1933, Freund fled Frankfurt for Paris, taking her camera with her (her negatives strapped around her body to get them past the border guards). 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. Among those to pose for her lens at this time were Andre Marlaux, Francois Mauriac, Stefan Zweig, Jean Cocteau, Louis Aragon, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Michaux, Andre Gide, Henri de Montherlant, Simone de Beauvoir and Samuel Beckett. 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. After the war, she moved on to Mexico for two years, becoming acquainted with Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo. 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 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. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C06E6DA103CF932A35757C0A9669C8B63sec=spon=pagewanted=1 http://www.galerie-clairefontaine.lu/gcf_site/vintage/source/freund01.ht -------------------------------- Music - "When I write my song" by Eddie Heywood Support the artist, buy his music http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_gw?url=search-alias%3Dapsfield-keywords=eddie+heywood+x=0y=0
Views :	1757
Rating :	4.80
Keywords, Tags :	Gisèle Freund loved reading Portraiture Writers
Video Length :	3 : 22

Comments :

Loved it. Absolutely fantastic.

Wonderful work!

Your taste in music combined with the incredible photos create a video like no other. You are so talented, Cybele.

lechugissima as usual. ...victoria...ocampo..whos is she?

she was an Argentine intellectual, Best known as an advocate for others and as publisher of the magazine Sur, she was also a writer and critic in her own right. (wikipedia ;-)). Saludos!!!

What can I say... There are not enough adjectives to describe your talent for sharing the work of artists...

Another great video, you are a star.