Phoebe Day

Doctoral research project supervised by Dr Robin Schuldenfrei; Advised by Professor Gavin Parkinson; Fully funded by the Consortium for the Humanities and Arts South-East England (CHASE)

From 1933 to 1935, the Paris-based, German Jewish exiles Gisèle Freund and Walter Benjamin met almost every day at the Bibliothèque nationale’s premises on the rue de Richelieu: she to work on her doctoral thesis on portrait photography in nineteenth-century France, the first doctoral thesis on photography, and he to work on The Arcades Project (1927-400, his study of nineteenth-century Paris. Freund completed her thesis in 1935 and, after that, Benjamin worked in the Bibliothèque nationale alone. When Freund returned to the French national library in 1936, she did so as a photographer. The director general of the library, Julien Cain, had commissioned her to photograph Parisian libraries for an exhibition on French libraries that he was organising for the 1937 Paris Exposition. Freund took hundreds of photographs of approximately thirty Parisian libraries, but she photographed the Bibliothèque nationale far more extensively than any other institution. In addition to the ten photographs that she took of Benjamin at the Bibliothèque nationale, the most famous photographs in her series, Freund took many close-up photographs of anonymous readers, predominantly at the Bibliothèque nationale, but also at other Parisian libraries.

In this thesis, I argue that Freund’s photographs of Benjamin at the Bibliothèque nationale testify to the personal friendship and intellectual dialogue on photography that Freund and Benjamin began at the Bibliothèque nationale in 1933, but that extended beyond the walls of the library and continued after Freund completed her doctorate. I argue that when viewed in the context of Freund’s report on Parisian libraries, Freund’s photographs of Benjamin at the Bibliothèque nationale enable us to situate them in the community of the Bibliothèque nationale, and indeed in a broader community of Parisian library-goers. I also pay attention to how Freund’s and Benjamin’s shared anti-fascist politics and experience of living in Paris as German Jewish exiles shaped their experience of working at the Bibliothèque nationale and the work they produced there. consider what it meant for Freund and Benjamin to participate in the intellectual life of the Bibliothèque nationale, the national library of their adopted country, at a time when antisemitic policies on books and libraries were being pursued by the Nazi regime in their native country.

In summary, thesis seeks to answer the following questions: to what extent were Freund’s photographs of the Bibliothèque nationale and other Parisian libraries, taken after her return to the Bibliothèque nationale in December 1936, shaped by her prior experience of working at the French national library, and by extension to her experience of Paris as a German Jewish exile? And to what extent does shifting the focus from Benjamin to Freund, and situating her photographs of Benjamin at the Bibliothèque nationale in the context of her report on Parisian libraries, challenge the idea that these photographs portray Benjamin as a melancholic and solitary intellectual?