Defining Society with Photographer Gisèle Freund
How the celebrated photographer found herself posing for Robert Mapplethorpe
Gisèle Freund, 1980, Robert Mapplethorpe. Gelatin silver print, 20 x 16 in. Promised gift of the Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation to the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, L.2012.89.657. © Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation
Body Content
Gisèle Freund was born in Germany in 1908, and fled to France in 1933 when the country was under Nazi rule.
As a Jew, a socialist, and a lesbian, she feared for her life after one of her friends was arrested and murdered. Freund, who had always loved taking pictures, established herself in Paris, where she became a photojournalist and a highly regarded portrait photographer.
In 1936, she completed her doctorate at the Sorbonne in sociology and art; in 1947, she became the only female founding member of Magnum Photos, the international photographic collective. Her insightful portraits of avant-garde artists and writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, Frida Kahlo, and André Malraux, among others, won her accolades in French society. In 1981, Freund took the official portrait of President François Mitterrand. Two years later she was made Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur, France’s highest decoration.
This portrait by the gay American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe was made in Freund’s apartment at 12 rue Lalande in Paris in 1980. Freund is seated in front of a bookcase that holds her 1939 portrait of the bisexual English writer Virginia Woolf, one of her personal heroes. Looking at her stern expression and guarded pose, one can sense Freund’s strength of character as well as her lack of ease in front of the camera, after a long career behind the lens.
A few years after Mapplethorpe’s death from the complications of AIDS, Freund admitted that she did not like to be photographed, but that Mapplethorpe begged her to allow him to shoot her. At first, she refused but softened when he complained bitterly about how difficult it was to develop a successful career as an artist. Mapplethorpe preferred to make portraits in his studio where he could exert the maximum amount of control. Here, photographer and sitter appear to have entered an uneasy truce.
In her 1974 book Photographie et société, Freund wrote, “The lens, the so-called impartial eye, actually permits every possible distortion of reality: the character of the image is determined by the photographer’s point of view and the demands of his patrons. The importance of photography does not rest primarily in its potential as an art form, but rather in its ability to shape our ideas, to influence our behavior, and to define our society.”
