Germaine Krull Dutch, 1897-1985

Germaine Krull (1897–1985) was a leading figure of the photographic avant-garde between the wars and a pioneer of modern photojournalism and the photographic book. Her Métal, published in 1928, established her at the forefront of the Nouvelle Vision. Comprising sixty-four plates of cranes, bridges, railways and the Eiffel Tower, photographed from below and at unexpected angles, the book transformed the industrial landscape into a field of dynamic forms and radical perspectives.

Born in Wilda, East Prussia, and raised without formal schooling as her father moved the family around Europe, Krull studied photography in Munich, where she subsequently opened a studio. She became caught up in the political upheavals of postwar Germany, participated in the Spartacist movement, and was arrested and expelled from the country. She went on to Russia, where her involvement with the Bolsheviks ended in her arrest, imprisonment, and near-execution by the Soviet government. She returned to Europe completely disillusioned with the Soviet regime, immediately declaring herself a staunch anti-Bolshevik. In Berlin in 1923, she made a series of nudes remarkable for their frankness and freedom of tone. Two years later, in the Netherlands, she photographed the cranes and metal structures of the Rotterdam docks that would become Métal.

Krull settled in Paris in 1926, working for Sonia Delaunay’s textile studio and for Peugeot and Shell. From 1928, she was a prominent contributor to VU, the new illustrated magazine, where she developed, alongside André Kertész and Eli Lotar, a form of reportage that brought the photographer into close proximity with the subject. She also contributed to Jazz, Variétés, Art et Médecine and L’Art vivant, while producing a remarkable sequence of books: 100 x Paris (1929), Études de nu and Le Valois (1930), La Route Paris-Biarritz (1931) and Marseille (1935). In 1931, she collaborated with Georges Simenon on La Folle d’Itteville, regarded as the first photographic novel.

The Second World War took Krull to Africa, where she joined the Free French forces and photographed the campaign for their press service, and subsequently to Southeast Asia as a war correspondent. She remained in Bangkok after the war, managing the Oriental Hotel for two decades, while continuing to photograph in India and Tibet. In later life, she settled near a Tibetan Buddhist community. Writing remained a constant throughout her life, as did her photographic practice, though her work received relatively little exhibition attention for decades.

A renewed interest in Krull’s work emerged with a presentation at the Musée du Cinéma in Paris in 1967, followed by exhibitions at the Rheinisches Landesmuseum in Bonn in 1977 and the Musée Réattu in Arles in 1988. The Museum Folkwang’s 1999 retrospective, drawing on its extensive holdings of her work, helped restore her place in the history of modern photography. In 2015, the Jeu de Paume presented A Photographer’s Journey, bringing together 130 vintage prints with the magazines and books for which many of the photographs had originally been made, illuminating the close relationship between Krull’s images and their printed contexts.

Krull left her archive to the Museum Folkwang in Essen, which holds her estate and administers the rights to her work. The museum organized the first major retrospective drawn from these archives, which subsequently travelled to the Centre Pompidou. Krull died in Wetzlar in 1985, aged eighty-eight. Bruce Silverstein Gallery has presented her work in Drawing the Line (2019), Amies de Chambre (2004) and TOPOGRAPHICS (2004).