Gisèle Freund

About the author

Gisèle Freund (1908–2000) was a German-born French photographer and photojournalist whose candid color portraits of writers and artists and pioneering documentary work set her apart in twentieth-century photography. Her landmark book Photographie et société (1974), expanded from her 1936 Sorbonne dissertation — one of the first doctoral theses on photography, and among the first completed by a woman there — established photography as a sociohistorical subject. She championed the Leica and early Kodachrome and Agfacolor film, shot the official portrait of President Mitterrand in 1981, and in 1985 became the first photographer honored with a retrospective at the Musée national d'art moderne.