Museum = museum

On Sunday, I walked to the Focke Museum, which was only about twenty minutes away from the guesthouse. It follows the small stream by the guesthouse, and I saw some ducks and ducklings swimming in it on my way there.

The museum has an exhibition by a photographer named Gisele Freund, who took portraits of many of the famous writers and artists of the early 20th century.

Here is the description from the culture and leisure section of bremen.de

Exhibition at the Focke Museum – Gisèle Freund

One of the most outstanding portrait and documentary photographers of the 20th century.

From 13 June to 4 October 2009, the Focke Museum will once again hold a large photography exhibition. After the success of the Feininger show last year, the Bremen state museum for art and cultural history is now turning its attention to the work of Gisèle Freund.

The exhibition
On more than 800qm, approximately 140 partly hand signed photos will be shown. Divided between two rooms, the exhibition shows Freund’s early documentary photos as well as her portraits.

Gisèle Freund
As portrait photographer of painters, sculptors and mainly authors, she made a name for herself in the 1930s. Remarkable was her intuition in capturing the personalities of the subjects, instead of just shooting superficial poses. The photographs were taken almost incidentally while the literature enthusiastic and well-read Gisèle Freund spoke to the authors about their work. In this way, they didn’t pay attention to the camera and acted naturally. The results were unique portraits of Bertolt Brecht, Anna Seghers, Alexej Tolstoi, Simone de Beauvoir, Walter Benjamin, Hermann Hesse, Stefan Zweig and many more. Already in 1938, she photographed with the newly launched and still very expensive colour film. In 1939, an impressive colour portrait of James Joyce appeared on the cover of Time Magazine. She took the only colour portraits of the camera-shy Virginia Woolf.