Gisèle Freund was a German-born French photographer and photojournalist best known for her portraits of writers and artists of the 20th century, as well as for her documentary photography. Born in Berlin in 1908, Freud studied sociology and art history at the Institute for Social Research of Frankfurt University in the early 1930s, where she studied under Theodor W. Adorno and Karl Mannheim and became politically active in anti-fascist circles along with Walter Benjamin and Bertolt Brecht. Freund fled Germany for Paris in 1933 due to her Jewish heritage and ties to anti-Hitler plots, eventually becoming a French citizen. In Paris she enrolled at the Sorbonne, where she shifted her focus to photography and received her doctorate in 1936. The same year, Adrienne Monnier published Freund's doctoral thesis, "La photographie en France au dix-neuvième siècle," which promoted the value of photography as a democratizing social force. Freund became close with Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach, and even lived with Monnier for a time in the apartment she had shared with Beach; they introduced Freund to the artists and writers in their literary circle who became the subjects of her most famous portraits. She photographed James Joyce at Beach's bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, in 1938. Upon the 1939 publication of Finnegan's Wake in England and the United States, Time magazine published a color photograph of Joyce by Freund on its front cover. Freund later published the entire series of portraits in her book James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years (1965). She also worked as a documentary photographer for Life magazine photographing the effects of the Depression in England in the mid-1930s.

With Hitler's invasion of Paris looming in 1940, Freund fled to southern France and, later, to Argentina in 1942 at the invitation of Victoria Ocampo, the founder of the influential Buenos Aires-based literary magazine Sur. During this time, she worked for the Louis Jouvet Theatre Company (1943-1944), on propaganda campaigns for France Libre (1944-1945), and as a freelance Latin American contributor for Magnum Photos (1947-1954). She was blacklisted from entering the United States during the McCarthy era due to her radical political ties. After moving to Mexico for two years, where she befriended Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Freund returned to Paris in 1953, where she lived until her death in 2000 at the age of 91. Throughout her life, Freund photographed an extensive number of well-known European and Latin American literary and cultural figures, including James Joyce, Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette, Pablo Neruda, George Bernard Shaw, Simone de Beauvoir, Samuel Beckett, T. S. Eliot, Eva Peron, Jorge Luis Borges, André Malraux, and many others. In addition her own photography, Freund is known for her influential critical works about photography, which include Le Monde et ma caméra (1970) and Photographie et société (1974). Freund also received many honors for her photography, including the Grand Prix National des Arts in 1980 and appointments as Officier des Arts et Lettres in 1982 and Chevalier de la Légion d'Honneur in 1983.