Gisele Freund's career is in the
field of photo reportage; her primary photographic interest is portraiture. Freund,
a native German, fled her country in 1933 to settle in Paris. She studied
sociology at the Sorbonne, a natural parallel to her ongoing interest in human
individuality. Later she immigrated once again, this time to the United States,
where she worked for Life
magazine
and joined Magnum as a photojournalist. However, she was drawn to portraiture
by the infinite variety of physiognomies continually parading before her, and
her sensitivity to the potential of the moment has enabled Freund to capture
revealing and singular expressions on the faces of her sitters. Preferring to
portray her subjects naturally and unwilling to submit to the strictures placed
upon commercial portraitists—retouching to beautify the model, for instance—Freund
finds pleasure in photographing writers and artists whose demands on the look
of the finished portraits are less demanding and more adventurous.

Often, Freund's relationships with
her sitters developed into lifelong friendships, as is the case with the writer-publisher
Leonard Woolf. In 1939 Freund photographed him and his famous wife, Virginia,
two years before the latter committed suicide. While visiting Woolf at his
country estate in Sussex almost thirty years later, Freund took this
understated portrait of the aging writer.