Published by Editions Denoël in 1982, Paris. Condition: Very Good.
.
Gisele Freund was an intellectual, a writer, a sociologist and was widely regarded as one of the world's greatest photographers. Raised in a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin, she fled during the war after one of her close friends were kidnapped and killed. She left with little more than her camera and rolls of negatives tapes around her body to get past the border guards. She moved to Paris before traveling around France and South America to escape the war and work. Over the course of her incredible career, she befriended and photographed some of the most famous figures of the twentieth century included Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Henri Mattise, T S Eliot, Colette, Jean Cocteau, Simone De Beauvoir, Andre Breton, and James Joyce, the infamously difficult writer. In Three Days with Joyce, Freund applies her famously candid and intimate approach to photography onto this famously formal and unintimate man. Her style often focused on hands, body posture, and clothing in order to translate a familiarity with her subjects, a unique ability that distinguished her in 20th Century photography. Joyce was said to be so uncomfortable during shooting that he hit his head frantically on a light, cutting his forehead and causing him to swear in front of a woman, something he had made a rule never to do. Joyce was said to exclaim “I’m bleeding! Your damned photos will be the death of me!” Freund crashed her car straight after, destroying the film in all her cameras from their shoot. She called him and said “Mr. Joyce, you damned my photos. You put some kind of bad Irish spell on them and my taxi crashed. I was almost killed and your photos are ruined.” Joyce was incredibly superstitious and believed his swearing had caused the crash. He had Freund return to his home to reshoot the beautifully personal photos you see in this book, where I'm sure he was a little nicer to her.