Photography and Society

Once the portrait market was established, photography began to spread outward into every corner of social life, and Freund tracks it with an eye for what each new use revealed. The camera went to war, to the colonies, into prisons and hospitals and slums. It recorded faces that had never been recorded — the poor, the criminal, the distant — and in doing so it turned photography into an instrument of knowledge and, just as often, of control.

She is attentive to how quickly the image became evidence. Police forces adopted the mug shot; anthropologists photographed colonized peoples as specimens; reformers documented tenement misery to move public opinion. The same technical act — pointing a lens and fixing a moment — served the state cataloguing its subjects and the campaigner trying to shame the state into acting. The photograph looked objective, and that appearance of objectivity was precisely what made it powerful in the hands of whoever controlled it.

Here the book draws on something no library could give it: Freund's own practice. She was a portraitist of the intellectual world, and her account of photographing writers is also an account of what a portrait actually negotiates between two people. She shot Colette, Cocteau, Joyce, Malraux, Walter Benjamin — figures who thought hard about images and were wary of sitting for one. The photographer, she knew, does not simply take a likeness; she coaxes, waits, and chooses the instant that will stand in for a whole person.

Her session with Virginia Woolf in 1939 became famous partly because Woolf hated being photographed and resented the intrusion. Freund's pictures of her are now among the most reproduced images of the writer — which tells its own story about how a photograph outlives the reluctance of its subject. The person sits once, uneasily; the image circulates forever, detached from that discomfort, standing in for the author on book jackets and in obituaries. The sitter loses control of her own face.

Step back from the studios and the writers, and the shape of Freund's argument becomes clear. The photograph, across her whole history, is never a neutral copy of reality. It is a socially produced object whose meaning depends on who makes it, who pays for it, and where it ends up. And by the twentieth century, with the illustrated press at its height, that object had become something specific: a commodity. The picture is bought and sold by the page, and its value is set not by what it shows but by what the market will pay to print it.

Freund watched the great picture magazines — Life, the Berliner Illustrirte, Vu, Paris Match — build empires on the photographic image, and she saw what that industrialization did to the photographer. The individual who once composed a portrait or witnessed an event became a supplier of raw material to editors who cropped, captioned, sequenced, and sold it. A photograph could be made to say almost anything depending on the words placed beside it and the story it was slotted into. The maker of the image no longer controlled its meaning; the publisher did.

Freund's book closes the loop it opened in the portrait studios of the 1840s. The camera that let a shopkeeper own a likeness once reserved for the wealthy ends, a century later, as the engine of an image industry that sells the world back to itself by the page. The same instrument served self-representation, surveillance, witness, and finally commerce — and at each stage its meaning was set by the social forces holding it, not by the lens.