Germaine Krull was a photographer, political activist, and hotel owner. Her nationality has been categorized as German, Polish, French, and Dutch, but she spent years in Brazil, Republic of the Congo, Thailand, and India.
Described as
"an especially outspoken example" of a group of early 20th-century female photographers who
"could lead lives free from convention", she is best known for photographically-illustrated books such as her 1928 portfolio
Métal. Germaine Luise Krull was born in Wilda, Poznan, then on the border between Germany and Poland in East Prussia, of an affluent German family. In her early years, the family moved around Europe frequently; she did not receive a formal education, but instead received homeschooling from her father, an accomplished engineer and a free thinker but a bit of a ne'er-do-well. Her father may have influenced her in at least two ways. First, he let her dress as a boy when she was young, which may have contributed to her ideas about women's roles later in her life. Second, his views on social justice
"also seem to have predisposed her to involvement with radical politics."
Between 1915 and 1917 or 1918 she attended the Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt für Photographie, a photography school in Munich, Germany, at which
Frank Eugene's teaching of pictorialism in 1907-1913 had been influential. She opened a studio in Munich in approximately 1918, took portraits of
Kurt Eisner and others, and befriended prominent people such as
Rainer Maria Rilke,
Friedrich Pollock, and
Max Horkheimer.
Krull was politically active between 1918 and 1921. In 1919 she switched from the Independent Socialist Party of Bavaria to the Communist Party of Germany, and was arrested and imprisoned for assisting a Bolshevik emissary's attempted escape to Austria. She was expelled from Bavaria in 1920 for her Communist activities, and traveled to Russia with her lover
Samuel Levit. After Levit abandoned her in 1921, Krull was imprisoned as an "anti-Bolshevik" and expelled from Russia.
She lived in Berlin between 1922 and 1925 where she resumed her photographic career. She and Kurt Hübschmann (later to be known as
Kurt Hutton) worked together in a Berlin studio between 1922 and 1924. Among other photographs, Krull produced in Berlin were nudes that one reviewer has likened to
"satires of lesbian pornography."
Having met Dutch filmmaker and communist
Joris Ivens in 1923, she moved to Amsterdam in 1925. After Krull returned to Paris in 1926, Ivens and Krull entered into a marriage of convenience between 1927 and 1943 so that Krull could hold a Dutch passport and could have a
"veneer of married respectability without sacrificing her autonomy." In Paris between 1926 and 1928, Krull became friends with
Sonia Delaunay,
Robert Delaunay,
Eli Lotar,
André Malraux,
Colette,
Jean Cocteau,
André Gide and others; her commercial work consisted of fashion photography, nudes, and portraits. During this period she published the portfolio
Métal (1928) which concerned
"the essentially masculine subject of the industrial landscape."
Krull shot the portfolio's 64 black-and-white photographs in Paris, Marseille, and Holland during approximately the same period as Ivens was creating his film
De Brug ("The Bridge") in Rotterdam, and the two artists may have influenced each other. The portfolio's subjects range from bridges, buildings (e.g., the Eiffel Tower), and ships to bicycle wheels; it can be read as either a celebration of machines or a criticism of them. Many of the photographs were taken from dramatic angles, and overall the work has been compared to that of
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and
Alexander Rodchenko.
In 1999–2004 the portfolio was selected as one of the most important photobooks in history. By 1928 Krull was considered one of the best photographers in Paris, along with
André Kertész and
Man Ray.
Between 1928 and 1933, her photographic work consisted primarily of photojournalism, such as her photographs for
Vu, a French magazine. also in the early 1930s, she also made a pioneering study of employment black spots in Britain for
Weekly Illustrated (most of her ground-breaking reportage work from this period remains immured in press archives and she has never received the credit which is her due for this work). Her book
Etudes de Nu ("Studies of Nudes") published in 1930 is still well-known today.
Between 1930 and 1935 she contributed photographs for a number of travel and detective fiction books. From 1935–1940, Krull lived in Monte Carlo where she had a photographic studio. Among her subjects during this period were buildings (such as casinos and palaces), automobiles, celebrities, and common people. She may have been a member of the
Black Star photojournalism agency which had been founded in 1935, but
"no trace of her work appears in the press with that label."
In World War II, she became disenchanted with the Vichy France government, and sought to join the Free French Forces in Africa. Due to her Dutch passport and her need to obtain proper visas, her journey to Africa included over a year (1941–1942) in Brazil where she photographed the city of Ouro Preto. Between 1942 and 1944 she was in Brazzaville in Republic of the Congo, after which she spent several months in Algiers and then returned to France.
After World War II, she traveled to Southeast Asia as a war correspondent, but by 1946 had become a co-owner of the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand, a role that she undertook until 1966. She published three books with photographs during this period and also collaborated with Malraux on a project concerning the sculpture and architecture of Southeast Asia.
After retiring from the hotel business in 1966, she briefly lived near Paris, then moved to Northern India and converted to the Sakya school of Tibetan Buddhism. Her final major photographic project was the publication of a 1968 book
Tibetans in India that included a portrait of the
Dalai Lama. After a stroke, she moved to a nursing home in Wetzlar, Germany, where she died in 1985.
Source: Wikipedia
