ABSTRACT
This essay examines the visual production of French-German photographer Gisèle Freund (1908−2000) during the interwar and immediate post-World War II years when she resided as a political refugee in Argentina and later worked and traveled in Chile, Perú, Mexico, Brazil, and Ecuador as the Magnum agency photo-reporter for Latin America. The Latin American corpus in Freund's work has seldom received critical attention, which has usually focused on her photographic portraiture—the pantheon of modernist writers and intellectuals she built from the 1930s through the 1960s. As Freund witnessed the joint failures of the leftist politics of Weimar Germany and the French Popular Front in their fights against fascism's spectacularization of cultural politics, her Latin American experience acquires a significant role, drawing a fractured map of complex cultural interconnections (the Sur group in Buenos Aires, the French ex-patriates dispersed in the region, Mexican avant-garde artists, and the Americas' left front) and making visible an expansive transnational framework. This chapter's decentering form of critique, which follows Freund's Latin American itineraries, situates her and her photography in previously unexplored and unsuspected Latin American contexts, elucidating the dynamics of modernist cultural networks in the first half of the twentieth century.
