On December 19, 1908, Gisèle Freund was born into a Jewish family in Berlin-Schöneberg. As a student in Frankfurt am Main, she was involved in an anti-Nazi resistance group before fleeing to Paris in 1933. There, she wrote a groundbreaking doctoral thesis on the historical role of photography. She worked as a photographer herself, specialising in artist portraits and was an early adopter of colour film. Thanks to her connections with women like Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, who ran the bookstore Shakespeare & Company on rue de l’Odéon in Paris, Gisèle Freund found herself at the heart of the interwar American literary colony on the Left Bank of the Seine. Her camera immortalised famous names such as Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Janet Flanner, and Djuna Barnes.