“The camera need not invent, manipulate or fool. It does not paint, nor does it imagine. The photographer is a witness, the witness of his time.” -Germaine Krull
Germaine Krull was a pioneer. Her work in photojournalism, photo books, and avant-garde photomontage was groundbreaking. In 1921 while visiting Russia she was jailed for her support of the Free French cause against Adolph Hitler. Her incarceration was so severe that her hair fell out. Expelled from Russia in 1922, she went to Paris where she found a job as the manager of a photo studio.
On the side, she began photographing a series of figure studies. One of these nude series had lesbian undertones. Another, Friends, was unabashedly erotic.
She worked with fabric designer Sonia Delaunay and created an edgy, glamorous ad campaign for designer Paul Poiret (opening photo, bottom row, second image).
Her artistic advancement happened in 1928 as she went on staff at a new publication: VU magazine.
“Métal”
While working at VU magazine, Germaine Krull published a work called Métal. It featured photos of iron giants — cranes, power generators, the Eiffel Tower, the Rotterdam transported bridge and other steel structures. She used radical angles and close-ups to show these massive structures in a very intimate way. The portfolio had 64 of her photos. It was published in 1928 (opening photo, top row, first four images).
VU magazine
VU was the first weekly illustrated magazine in France. Joining photographers like André Kertész and Éli Lotar on its masthead, Germaine Krull reported with a style of closeness to her subjects. Her work was intimate and close-up. She used a small format Zeiss Icon Icarette, a portable folding bed camera that used roll film.
Not long after joining VU, she had an exhibit at the Salon de L’escalier and soon after that at the Jeu de Paume show. The Surrealist Belgian magazine, Variétés published her work.
Man Ray
Germaine Krull met Man Ray in the 1920s in Paris. Ray told her, “Germaine, you and I are the greatest photographers of our time, I in the old sense you in the modern one.”
Her work in creating surreal photomontages made her a pioneer in the modernist photography movement. She gathered her work into a photo book that Martin Parr and Gerry Badger said in their book “The Photobook Vol. 1,” is “the finest example of a modernist photo book in the dynamic, cinematic mode” from a photographer “at the forefront of radical modernism.” Germaine Krull was a pioneer in making photobooks that were artistic ends in themselves.
Portraits
Germaine Krull was an accomplished portrait photographer. Her subjects included Jean Cocteau and André Malraux.
Sources: MoMA, Camerapedia
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