The exhibition outlines half a century of the astonishing life of this great woman photographer. The photographs reveal Freund’s great visual perception, influenced by the numerous encounters, milieu and cultures she crossed, and inspired by the lights and colours of the countries where she lived and travelled. The photographs here exhibited reveal the sensibilities of her glance able to catch the atmospheres, events and characters of her time. Gisèle Freund expresses herself in the best way in her portraits. Photography is there used as a medium to capture the personality of her subjects trying to tell theirs intimate life, theirs personal stories, gestures and places. Freund uses photography, with an unmistakable style, to catch a peculiar and representative moment of the life of each person of importance she photographed. In the exhibition we present portraits of André Malraux, James Joyce, Walter Benjamin, Virginia Woolf, André Gide, Tristan Tzara, T. S. Eliot, Jean Cocteau, Henri Matisse, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras and many others.
The photographs with some original books offer a global vision of Freund’s body of work and of the historical context she passed through, one of the most stimulating and prolific of the Twentieth Century.