Germaine Krull

Germaine Krull was born in Germany in 1897 and pursued photography while moving through Munich, the Netherlands and Paris. ^*1 She established her base of operations in Paris in the 1920s, working in parallel on magazine reportage, fashion and avant-garde photographic experiment. ^*2 Her 1928 photobook Métal — compositions of the Eiffel Tower's iron structures, machines and urban infrastructure made with extreme angles and fragmentation — occupies an important place in the history of the photobook. ^*3

Her career is characterised by a mobility that resists fixing to a single country or movement. Her connections include French Surrealism, journalism, and travel photography in Southeast Asia and India. ^*4 Centre Pompidou and MoMA both position her at the intersection of the avant-garde and popular reportage and publishing. ^*5 She died in Germany in 1985. ^*6

Métal and the structure of the photobook

Krull's Métal is not a photobook that documents machinery: it is a book that edits the skeleton of the modern city as fragments, diagonals, repetitions and the rhythm of print. ^*7 Iron towers and bridges may be massive structures, but on the pages of the photobook they become abstract compositional elements. What matters here is that the photobook as a medium creates a sequential visual experience rather than a collection of individual photographs. MoMA's Object:Photo project includes Métal as a significant case in photobook history, analysing the aesthetics of sequencing and printing. ^*8

Where Rodchenko used extreme angles within post-revolutionary Soviet public vision and Sheeler saw American industry as precise order, Krull grasped urban infrastructure as a moving gaze. ^*9 Her photographs have an industrial beauty while also connecting to reportage, travel, commercial publishing and political migration, resisting fixing to a single country or style. Comparing her with Rodchenko, Moholy-Nagy and Sheeler reveals the multiple directions taken by industrial modernism. ^*10

Reportage, mobility and the position of the woman photographer

Krull worked as a press photographer covering political events across Europe while continuing her avant-garde photographic experiments in parallel. ^*11 The evaluation of her as a woman photographer with a mobility and cross-media range that resists a national artist image has been one of the frameworks in which she is discussed at Jeu de Paume, MoMA and elsewhere. ^*12 Centre Pompidou's collection holds Krull's photographs and archives, forming the basis for research that re-evaluates her at the intersection of avant-garde vision and reportage and publishing. ^*13

MoMA, Centre Pompidou, Jeu de Paume, the Getty and Tate all provide access to works and materials, and re-evaluation continues both of her position at the intersection of avant-garde vision and reportage/publishing and of her mobility as a woman photographer. ^*14 ICP, the Metropolitan Museum, the AIC and the MFA Boston also hold related works. ^*15 In later photobook studies, Métal is repeatedly cited as an early example of the photobook functioning as a medium that creates a distinctive visual experience through editing, printing and design rather than simply collecting photographs. ^*16 Krull's mobility and cross-media range have been discussed as a case for reconsidering the position of women photographers within photographic history, given how difficult her practice is to contain within a national artist image. Her practice — spanning avant-garde, reportage and commercial work in equal measure — demonstrates a diversity in early twentieth-century photographic practice that resists single-genre framing.