“I think a portrait is successful if you find the personality of the subject photographed in the photo, and not that of the photographer,” in the words of Gisèle Freund. During the 1940s, she became famous for her photograph portraits of important intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, but also exiled Germans such as Walter Benjamin or Stefan Zweig. Gisela Freund was born in Berlin as a child of a Jewish family. While studying sociology, she became involved in leftist student groups and fled from the Nazis to Paris in 1933. She there wrote her doctoral thesis on the impact of photography and began to earn a living by shooting reportage photography. She fled the arrival of the Germans in the city with a friend on bike. She spent the next years in Argentina, Chile, and Mexico, where she also created famous portraits, like those of Eva Perón or Frida Kahlo. She returned to her chosen home of Paris in the 1950s.