Germaine Krull’s 1928 publication Métal is often described as one of the most significant photobooks of the twentieth century. Interestingly, Métal is not a book in a conventional sense, of sequential pages bound together with a narrative to guide the structure. Rather, when looking through this new acquisition to the NGV Collection you can immediately appreciate its unique design as an object. This dynamic format which, along with the vitality of the photography, has continued to inspire graphic designers, book publishers and artists since its publication almost a century ago.
Métal consists of a folded board cover, with ribbons attached, that acts as a folder for the pages within. The cover, designed by artist Lou Tchimoukow, reproduces one of Krull’s photographs of a detail of machinery on Paris’s Eiffel Tower. This image is overlaid with bold, vertically arranged letters spelling out ‘KRULL’ in a staggered pattern that mimics the lines of the structure beneath. Within the folder are sixty-four unbound plates. Each plate reproduces a photograph by Germaine Krull of industrial forms (and on one occasion, two images to a page) printed as collotypes, as well as the words ‘Krull, Métal’ at the top left, the plate number at the top right, and the publisher’s information ‘A. Calavas, Paris’ at the base. There is also an insert of eight pages (two sheets folded) that includes texts by journalist Florent Fels, and words from Krull herself.
At the time of this publication in 1928 in Paris, Germaine Krull was in her early thirties; she had travelled extensively and lived in several European cities before establishing a studio in the French capital. Born in Posen-Wilda, Poland, in 1897, Krull initially studied at one of the few photography schools admitting women, the Lehr- und Versuchsanstalt für Photographie, Chemigraphie, Lichtdruck und Gravüre in Munich, Germany, and ran a photo studio in the city around 1918. In the years that followed, Krull’s engagement in left-wing political activism led to her arrest, and brief imprisonment, in Bavaria and Russia. Finally reaching Berlin in 1922 she eventually began photographing again, including many images of female nudes.
Krull moved to Amsterdam in 1925 with Joris Ivens, a Dutch filmmaker (whom she later married in 1927, described by some as a ‘marriage of convenience’; she was also in a relationship with a woman around this time); and in around 1926 returned to Paris. She was soon immersed in the avant-garde and artistic circles of the city during that extraordinary, turbulent interwar period: artists Sonia and Robert Delaunay were friends and supporters, along with writers and artists, such as Colette, Jean Cocteau, André Malraux and Man Ray.
Within this artistic milieu Krull’s photographic vision started to develop and expand, and her images – including several of the Eiffel Tower – began to be published in magazines, such as VU. Her photographs moved between documentary, modernist and commercial styles, and began to show an interest in the lines and forms of the bridges and cranes that had first captured her imagination in Amsterdam, when walking around the port areas in Rotterdam with Ivens (who was shooting the footage for his 1928 film, De Brug (The Bridge).
As she revealed, ‘These steel giants revealed something to me that made me love photography again. From this moment onward, I began to SEE things as the eye sees them, and it is at this moment that photography was born for me.’1 Germaine Krull, in her unpublished memoir, Click entre deux guerres (Click, Between Two Wars), quoted in Lederman, Russet and Yatskevich, Olga (eds),WHAT THEY SAW: Historical Photobooks by Women 1843–1999, 10×10 Photobooks, 2021, pp. 60–1.
For Métal, Krull brought together a selection of recent photographs which, as she wrote in the introductory text, were from sites that included the Eiffel Tower, as well as the cranes and transport bridges of Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Marseille and Saint-Malo. Apart from the Eiffel Tower, they are emblematic of new industries and engineering emerging in these European cities in the decade after the end of the First World War and could, at first glance, be read as a tribute to modernity as seen through this rapid industrial development.
The presentation of the photographs, however, disrupts the opportunity for any clear narrative, or interpretation. While they are numbered, Krull’s images are printed without any captions (a radical technique in a photobook for the period). The audience is encouraged to actively engage: they are able to construct their own sequences and visual associations. And the composition of the images is highly varied – some close up and cropped, showing the cogs, bolts and mechanics; some reveal dizzying angles and perspectives; some show clear lines, some are abstracted; the majority are taken outside, some are within a factory; some are printed on the vertical, some on the horizontal; some are the result of multiple exposures, as if to emphasise a sense of movement or energy.
Art historian Professor Kim Sichel writes that Krull constructs an ‘activist narrative’ in Métal: ‘Through narrative techniques that are part taxonomy, part lyrical poem, part vertiginous montage, part Industrial-Age adulation, and by making the whole volume uncomfortable and strange to read, she brings her machine parts to life as they oscillate uneasily throughout the album’.2Kim Sichel, ‘Montage: Germaine Krull’s Métal’, in Sichel, Kim, Making Strange: The Modernist Photobook in France, Yale University Press, Connecticut, 2020, pp. 33–4.
The photographs in Métal can be linked to contemporary art movements circulating within Europe, such as the visual language of the ‘New Vision’ styles of photography emerging out of the Bauhaus in Germany, or the clean lines of the ‘New Objectivity’ as demonstrated by photographers, such as Albert Renger-Patzsch. Krull’s photographic vision, however, remains dynamic and unique – it does not follow one clear aesthetic or technical path. Métal is an innovative publication: it is open-ended and allows for endless interpretations.
Métal was the first of six photobooks published between 1928 and 1935 consisting entirely of Krull’s photographs, during a highly prolific period in her artistic career. Another publication, Études de Nu (Nude studies) (1930) was also recently acquired into the NGV Collection. Through these acquisitions some of the most significant photographic imagery of Krull, as well as examples of the highly innovative publishing and graphic design of the period, are revealed.
Maggie Finch is NGV Curator, Photography.
This article first appeared in the January–February 2024 edition of NGV Magazine.
Notes
Germaine Krull, in her unpublished memoir, Click entre deux guerres (Click, Between Two Wars), quoted in Lederman, Russet and Yatskevich, Olga (eds),WHAT THEY SAW: Historical Photobooks by Women 1843–1999, 10×10 Photobooks, 2021, pp. 60–1.
Kim Sichel, ‘Montage: Germaine Krull’s Métal’, in Sichel, Kim, Making Strange: The Modernist Photobook in France, Yale University Press, Connecticut, 2020, pp. 33–4.