Gisele Freund

As this beautiful volume testifies, the life of Gisele Freund (1908–2000) was populated by a glamorous cast of characters. Famed for her documentary photographs of 1930s Britain and Germany on the brink of Nazism, Freund spent most of her life in Paris, where she relocated in 1933, and where she haunted the Saint-Germain-des-Près neighbourhood--in particular the legendary bookstore Shakespeare and Company. It was there that she began to make hundreds of now classic portraits of artists and writers, among them James Joyce, Henry Miller, Virginia Woolf, Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Michaux, André Breton, Walter Benjamin, Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. This meticulously designed facsimile is made of two scrapbooks, made by Freund, that collect her favorite portraits. The first reproduces full-bleed, black-and-white portraits en face with her typed notes; the second, bound with a red ribbon, contains 116 spot-varnished color photographs with Freund's handwritten captions.