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: 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. 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 December 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 he was organising for the 1937 Paris Exposition.

Freund’s photographs of Benjamin at the Bibliothèque nationale have not previously been viewed as political images, nor has her broader report on Parisian libraries. In this thesis, I argue that these photographs of Benjamin show him to be connected to the harsh political realities of the world beyond the walls of the historic library as well as connected to the people around him. I argue that Freund’s photographs of the Bibliothèque nationale and other Parisian libraries testify to the participation of Freund and Benjamin, two German Jewish exiles, in the intellectual life of the Bibliothèque nationale, the national library of their adopted country, and to their participation in a broader community of Parisian library-goers, at a time when antisemitic policies on books and libraries were being pursued by the Nazi regime in their native country. I view the aesthetic of Freund’s photographs of Benjamin and other readers at Parisian libraries as an antifascist aesthetic that was shaped by Freund’s antifascist politics, and by the Marxist approach to photography that underpinned her doctorate, which she had primarily worked on at the Bibliothèque nationale, and her other writings on the medium from the 1930s.