Germaine Krull: Culture Beyond the Colonial Frame
Germaine Krull was never an easy photographer to place.
Born in 1897, she became one of the pioneers of modern photography and an important figure in the New Vision movement of the 1920s. She photographed machines and bridges from dizzying angles, Paris streets and cafés, workers, fashion, women, nudes and everyday life. Her camera rarely behaved conventionally.
But experimentation was only part of it. Krull believed photography was a way of witnessing and reporting the world in front of her. Even when using the tilted angles and unusual perspectives associated with the photographic avant-garde, she remained interested in people and in how they actually lived.
Her politics were equally restless. During World War II, Krull left Vichy France and eventually joined the anti-Nazi movement led by Charles de Gaulle.
And then came a contradiction that feels striking today.
The movement fighting to free France from German occupation was itself determined to retain France’s colonial empire.
Africa and the Free French propaganda service
In 1942, Krull arrived in Brazzaville, then one of the centers of de Gaulle’s Free French movement in Africa, and took charge of its newly created photographic service.
Her job included propaganda.
French Equatorial Africa and Cameroon had become enormously important to de Gaulle. They supplied territory, military bases, troops and resources to the Free French war effort. Krull was sent throughout the region to document agricultural production, gold, rubber, timber, ports and other resources — photographs that could demonstrate the importance of the colonies to France.
The political contradiction is hard to miss.
France was fighting against occupation in Europe while continuing to occupy and govern territories in Africa.
But Krull did not photograph only what her assignment required.
As she traveled through Cameroon, Gabon, Congo, Chad and what is now the Central African Republic, her camera also turned toward landscapes, people, clothing, dance, music and everyday culture. The surviving archive contains both the colonial machinery of production and the people whose lives existed outside that official story.
Krull had been sent to Africa, at least in part, to make propaganda.
She photographed the ports and resources the French government wanted photographed.
But she also photographed faces, clothing, music, dance and ordinary life.
Her archive showed what life really looked like.
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