Benutzerspezifische Werkzeuge

Frankfurt - Paris: Gisèle Freund’s Portraits, 1938-1940

In this workshop, I will examine the working trajectories of the German-French portrait photographer Gisèle Freund (1908 -2000) during the interwar years, with special focus on her volte-face from the portrayal of the collective subject in the political demonstrations in pre-exile Frankfurt to the color portraits of individual faces of the French intellectuals after her exile in Paris.

I argue that her turn to the individual human subject during her period of exile should not be seen as an anachronistic return to the ideology of bourgeois humanism or as an escape into silence. Freund’s volte-face in exile should be understood as an effort to dissociate her practice from the ineffective “dis-cursive formations” of French Popular Front politics and aesthetics and from the totalizing interpretation of the history of fascism. Especially, I will explore Freund’s conversion to the individual countenance of the intellectuals in exile in relation to the German sociologist Karl Mannheim’s concept of “free-floating intelligentsia.”