Freund, Gisèle

Gisèle Freund, one of the great photographers of the 20th century, was born in Berlin in 1908 into a wealthy Jewish family. She received her first camera at the age of 15. She left her country in 1933 due to the political landscape. One year prior, she had the opportunity to photograph demonstrations in Frankfurt against Nazism before Hitler came to power. She studied sociology and completed a thesis dedicated to 19th-century French photography, which she presented in 1936. Her most famous book, published belatedly in 1974, is "Photography and Society". Her analysis of photography was neither technical nor artistic. Freund argued that photography was intimately linked to social media, advertising, and politics. She gained prominence as a photojournalist by portraying numerous figures of the time, including Diego Rivera, Man Ray, Virginia Woolf, Frida Kahlo, Julio Cortázar, among many others. It's worth mentioning that these portraits of individuals do not stand out in themselves, nor do they enjoy any aesthetic particularity. The true point of interest lies in the person portrayed. Gisèle Freund often said that her intention in this type of photography was to find the emotions behind the mask (the face) and that she only took them when she had established a minimal relationship with the person photographed. For ethical reasons, she was completely against retouching.