Gisèle Freund (1908–2000)

Gisèle Freund was born to a prosperous Jewish family in Berlin. Her parents were Julius Freund, a passionate art collector with an interest in photography, and his wife Clara. Julius Freund gave his daughter her first camera in 1929 as a present for her graduation from gymnasium (high school).
It was a Leica that Gisèle later said was "her companion all her life."
In 1931, she began studying sociology and art history at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg, and in 1932-1933, she studied at the Institute for Social Research at Goethe University Frankfurt (known as the Frankfurt School) with Theodor W. Adorno, Karl Mannheim, and Norbert Elias. At university, she became an active member of a student socialist group and began her photojournalism.

In March 1933, a month after the Nazi Party rose to power in Germany, Gisèle fled to Paris, with her negatives strapped around her body to get them past the border guards. She continued her studies at the Sorbonne, working on her Ph.D. in the Bibliothèque Nationale, where she befriended Walter Benjamin.
Gisèle met and later photographed many notable artists and writers of her day, including Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Jean-Paul Sartre, James Joyce, Henri Matisse, Samuel Beckett, T.S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Jean Cocteau, and André Breton. She became the first woman photographer in France to use 35mm color film and color slides, a new technology at the time.

Gisèle completed her doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1936, and Adrienne Monnier published the groundbreaking dissertation in book form as La photographie en France au dix-neuvieme siècle (Photography in France in the 19th Century), under her imprint La Maison des Amis des Livres.
In 1940, with the Nazi invasion of France in World War II, Gisèle escaped to the Dordogne region, where she lived in hiding for two years. Then with the intervention of her friend André Malraux, she was able to flee to Buenos Aires, Argentina. There Gisèle met and photographed more great writers and artists such as Jorge Luis Borges.
She conducted photo documentary reporting in remote areas such as Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia, and traveled through Chile, Peru, Bolivia, Brazil, and Ecuador, writing stories published by European and American magazines.
In 1947, she signed a contract with Magnum Photos, beginning a seven-year association with the historic photographic news agency. In 1953, she returned to Paris, where she wrote her memoirs, The World in My Camera (1974) and numerous other acclaimed books. She became president of the French Federation of Creative Photographers in 1977, and in 1980 was the first woman to receive the Grand Prix National des Arts. In 1991, she was the first photographer honored with a retrospective at the Musée National d’art Moderne.