From Metal to Stone: The Architectural Gaze in Germaine Krull's Latin American Photobook

In 1941, running away from the nazi occupation of France, German photographer Germaine Krull leaves behind a successful career as photojournalist, photobook author and leading figure in the avant-garde modernist circles. Among her accomplishments of this period is her most famous portfolio series Métal, published in 1928, a collection of 64 pictures of modernist iron structures, including cranes, railways, power generators, the Rotterdam transporter bridge, and the Eiffel Tower, shot in now characteristic style of New Vision close-ups and from vertiginous angles. If usually thought of as a radical formal experimentation that epitomizes the excitement of modern urban life, with its capture of movement in dizzying compositions of overlapping and intersecting details. Her fateful journey on board of a cargo ship accompanied by André Breton, Jacqueline Lamba and Cuban artist Wifredo Lam among others would take her to very different scenarios, Martinique and the Caribbean, Rio de Janeiro, and later to Bronzeville in Africa from where she would work for the French resistance. The Latin American corpus in Krull's work — as in many other European women modern photographers— has received little attention, this paper explores the transforming vision displayed in Métal as she confronts the Latin American landscape and baroque architecture, the stillness of stone and wood structures registered in her photobook Ouro Preto (1942) published in homage to the country that provided her political asylum. From Métal to Ouro Preto, from industrial modernity to baroque ruins, we explore the aesthetics and politics Krull pursued along her exilic itinerary.