Artist: Gisèle Freund 1912-2000

I read about Freund in Fifty Key Writers on photography and think her writing will be useful for me. Reading about her, I see further references to meaning being dissolved during the years leading up to WWII. “They (she and Benjamin) shared a mutual desire to displace the empty, iconic forms of fascist art and writing with an intimate humanism in the arts, and a need to restore meaning and value to a world emptied of content.” https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/freund-gisele

I have written about zero signs a plenty and will no doubt continue to do so.

Freund’s commitment to images which contained a sense of humanism and her aversion to props, posing and styling echo my own working preferences. She worked as I try to, engaging in a conversation and capturing moments which she didn’t believe signified the whole person or their ‘soul’ but aimed to represent a kind of stream of consciousness, according to the author of the Encyclopaedia of Jewish Women page on Freund, Carleen Meeker.

Her writing sounds very much like the sort of thing I’d find useful – she too is interested in ‘the role of context in meaning’ or ‘the relationship of “the artistic scope of a work to the social structure at the time of its production”‘ – and she sees the negative and positive aspects of technology when describing its affect and impact (2013, 110).

I look forward to finding out more.

Durden, M. 2013 Ed. Fifty Key Writers on Photography, Routledge, Abingdon