Even if you don’t realize it, you’re likely familiar with at least one portrait by Gisèle Freund (1908–2000). Consider her official portrayal of François Mitterrand as Head of State, seated in the Elysée Palace library, lips pursed in a restrained smile. Or her striking depictions of Frida Kahlo, radiant, and Diego Rivera—whom she humorously described as “ugly as a louse”—against his monumental frescoes. Another notable piece is the iconic photograph of André Malraux, whom Freund called “a literally gifted being,” caught with windswept hair, an intense gaze, and a cigarette hanging from his lips.
For Freund, such portraits were second nature. Her doctoral thesis explored the democratization of portraiture in photography, following its transition from painting—an audacious notion at the time, given photography’s yet-to-be recognized status as a legitimate artistic medium. A devoted admirer of Félix Nadar and his nineteenth-century gallery of notables—from Baudelaire to Sarah Bernhardt—Freund set out to assemble her own collection of icons, this time capturing the luminaries of 1930s Paris in vibrant color.
Diverging from the societal pleasantries typically associated with the genre, and which later contributed to her fame, Freund’s early work tells a different story. Born into a bourgeois Berlin family and studying sociology in Frankfurt, she immersed herself in leftist political activism, documenting her daily interactions with teachers and friends. Together, they distributed leaflets, put up posters, and participated in Communist demonstrations. At the May Day parade in 1931, she snapped a powerful image of a banner proclaiming, “Photography is also a weapon in the class struggle!”
Did Freund make this her personal mantra? She quickly shifted her focus to the rise of fascism, capturing chilling Nazi salutes from German students. By 1933, the horrors of the Third Reich—the bruised and battered bodies of her fellow protesters—drove her into exile in France. Being Jewish, anti-fascist, and communist represented a triple death sentence.
Risking her life, she smuggled these damning photographs across the border. In a desperate act of self-preservation, she tossed the film from her camera into the train’s toilet en route to Paris, just moments before a police inspection. “As for the second roll, the most crucial since it contained photos of injured demonstrators, I hid it in my undergarments,” she later disclosed. These stark images of state violence eventually found their way into various anti-Nazi publications.
This phase marked the apparent end of Gisèle Freund’s political engagement. For reasons of security—and possibly due to internal disputes within the Communist Party—she seemed to retreat from active militancy soon after her arrival in France. At least on the surface. As the Pavillon Populaire exhibition vividly demonstrates, the spirit of resistance never left her, manifesting not through overt activism but through her evocative images and writings.
“Gisèle Freund is primarily recognized as a social thinker in the realm of photography, rather than as a photographer,” observes Gilles Mora, the artistic director of the Pavillon Populaire. “This exhibition attempts to merge these two aspects: the photographer and the sociologist.” This show is particularly significant for this photographer and art historian, marking the culmination of his fourteen years at the helm of this venue, celebrated for its high-quality, accessible exhibitions.
“Contributing to world peace”
Gisèle Freund’s educational background fostered her interest in community living—a coexistence not always marked by harmony. “I viewed photography as a marvelous way for people to understand each other. I believed in this utopia: that knowing others, understanding their differences, could be a language of peace among humans. I thought my role was to contribute to world peace through photography,” she explained to writer Rauda Jamis in 1991.
While her documentary photographs may not have united society, they vividly chronicled social injustices. In 1935, she traveled to Northern England to document the effects of the economic crisis in industrial and mining areas. Her lens and her pen took her to Jarrow, Maryport, Newcastle, and Whitehaven, where she captured images of derelict shipyards, idle miners, women knee-deep in sludge, and ragged, barefoot children.
Freund wrote her own texts and captions to accompany her photo reports, capturing the appalling living conditions. For instance, alongside a full-length portrait of a despondent man, she wrote, “He stands at the door of his house trying to smile. His clothes are threadbare. His pipe is empty. Eight years without a job.” Another caption, under a photo of children of the unemployed, poignantly asks, “Will they ever find work?”
The tone aims to stir emotions and prompt readers to take action. “Communist ideas are subtly woven through the lines of articles that do not overtly present themselves as militant,” observes Lorraine Audric, co-curator of the exhibition, in the photography journal Transbordeur. By merging “the power of description with the precision of the camera,” Freund controls the narrative from start to finish, straddling the line between committed photojournalism and sociological reportage.
Among the collection, one photograph stands out for its simplicity in both content and form. Titled “Unemployed Miners by the Sea,” it shows two male figures lost in thought against the vastness of the ocean. More poetic than didactic, this image and its caption provoke a profound emotional response. It is this subtle social perspective, lesser known to the public, that the Pavillon Populaire has chosen to emphasize.
The exhibition also highlights Freund’s work in South America, showcasing rarely seen documents like her photographs of a tin mine in Argentina at 5,000 meters above sea level. Unconvinced by the English operators’ claims that conditions were excellent, Freund went to see for herself. She found workers exploited in extreme weather conditions, housed in makeshift camps.
“The workers—mostly Indigenous people from Bolivia—had only miserable huts at their disposal. They continually chewed coca leaves to stave off hunger,” she indignantly recounts in her autobiography Mémoire de l’œil (Seuil, 1977). At the world’s end, in Patagonia, she photographed—and occasionally filmed—the forgotten outcasts, such as the last survivors of the Ona tribe, decimated by colonization.
“Here are the inhabitants at the world’s edge. They lead a miserable life, shielding themselves from the relentless wind with only a shack of branches that not even a fox would claim as a den,” Freund writes in a caption for one of her images. She also explored the lives of convicts in the Ushuaia prison. “I found myself heading to Tierra del Fuego. It was where convicts were sent because escape was impossible: blocked by the Andes on one side and the end of the world on the other,” she recalls in an interview with Rauda Jamis.
The sociologist behind the camera also sought to highlight the plight of peasants suffering from hunger in rural Mexico in 1947, marking the start of her collaboration with the Magnum agency, where she served as the Latin America correspondent until 1954. When she visited New York in 1970, the sixty-year-old wandered through the Harlem district to document, once more, the poverty and misery she witnessed.
Reporting involves more than just taking photos. With this in mind, the curators thoughtfully displayed the photographer’s tools. Her trusty Leica camera, Agfa and Kodak color films, negatives, contact sheets, and even her travel suitcase—which “still smelled of tobacco” when opened (Freund was a heavy smoker)—are all part of the exhibit. Her slide projector, essential for presenting her work to the public, is also showcased.
Text and image merge into performances that reveal the literary and philosophical layers of Freund’s work. The exhibition’s final section emphasizes this intellectual aspect, showcasing how “she continually questioned our relationship with images, explored their myriad uses in our everyday lives, and paid close attention to how we view them, thus enabling us to ‘see the seeing’.”
The concept of the gaze is central to the exhibition’s final part. In the synopsis for an unrealized film project titled “In the Land of Images,” Freund envisaged a scene reminiscent of Jacques Tati: “Sequence: Coaches arrive and halt at Notre-Dame. Tourists disembark, each with a camera. Close-up on the cameras. Voiceover: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, you have 5 minutes to take pictures.’” She concludes with a statistic: “One out of five French people is a photographer. One out of three Americans. One out of two Japanese.”
Behind the potential comedy of such an image frenzy, Freund’s concerns about the proliferation and acceleration of images are evident, as is the photographer’s detachment from their subjects. She is as interested in the viewer’s role as in that of the subject. At the bottom of the first page of the synopsis, she notes: “We pass through a photo exhibition. People watching photos.” Thus, we too are positioned as spectators, experiencing a mise en abyme.
Aware of the dramatization of reality in photography, did Gisèle Freund use it to disseminate her ideas? The exhibition subtly portrays the destiny of a woman who was more socially and politically engaged than might be assumed. According to Teri Wehn-Damisch, Freund’s close friend and co-curator of the exhibition, this commitment is unmistakable. “In Germany, she is primarily seen as a political photographer.” For Freund, photography was also a means of liberation.
“Gisèle Freund: Une Écriture du Regard” is on display at the Pavillon Populaire in Montpellier, France until February 9, 2025.
