[6] Freund's major contributions to photography include using the Leica Camera (with its ability to house 35 mm film rolls with 36 frames) for documentary reportage and pioneering Kodachrome and Agfacolor positive film for colour portraits of writers and artists, which allowed her to develop a "uniquely candid portraiture style" that distinguishes her in 20th-century photography.

[11] In March 1933, a month after Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, Walter Benjamin fled to Paris on 30 May, Gisèle followed him since she was both a socialist activist and a Jew.

Gisèle and Walter Benjamin would continue their friendship in Paris, where Freund would famously photograph him reading at the National Library.

André Malraux was the first to ask her to photograph him for an upcoming book, not a conventional portrait, but in a more candid fashion, that was trending in Paris at the time.

[12] Being acquainted now, Malraux invited Freund to document the First International Congress in Defence of Culture in Paris of 1935, where she was introduced to and subsequently photographed many of the notable French artists of her day.

He was impressed enough by Freund's work to allow her to photograph him, and over a period of three days, she captured the most intimate portraits of Joyce during his time in Paris.

The entire series of photographs would eventually be published in 1965 in James Joyce in Paris: His Final Years by Freund and V. B. Carleton and a preface by Simone de Beauvoir.

Woolf even "agreed to change her clothes to see which best suited the colour harmony and insisted on being photographed with Leonard (and their spaniel Pinka).

The background of fabrics and mural panels by Bell and Grant adds to the value of the images; this was the inner sanctum of the queen of Bloomsbury where parties were given and friends came to tea.

[20] Just before the beginning of the war her parents had finally fled Germany to Great Britain in February 1939, and the Nazis confiscated all their belongings, they had to leave behind.

The father died two years later, and her mother, penniless, was forced to sell the art collection, that had already been moved to neutral Switzerland in 1933, shortly after Hitler's Machtergreifung.

Ocampo was at the center of the Argentinean intellectual elite, and through her Freund met and photographed many great writers and artists, such as Jorge Luis Borges and Pablo Neruda.

"[23] While living in Argentina, Freund started a publishing venture called Ediciones Victoria, that would feature books on France.

This edition of the important international exhibition for contemporary art, had a focus on photography and celebrated its 150-year anniversary with a large survey, in which pictures of Joyce and Evita Perón were featured in its portrait section.

Since 2011 Freund's principal estate is managed through l'Institut Mémoires de l'Édition Contemporaine (IMEC) in Paris and stored at Abbaye d'Ardenne, near Caen.

Besides the photographs the collection comprises manuscripts, notebooks, diaries, letters and documents pertaining to exhibitions and the management of her archive.

Formerly in the hands of Hans Puttnies (1946–2020), who had closely worked with Gisèle Freund for over twenty years, the museum bought, with the financial help of the city, his collection of photographs, writings and other documents and belongings of her.

Besides personal notes, address books and correspondences there are previously unreleased manuscripts, such as a typoscript of an unfinished autobiographical novel Freund wrote in Mexico between 1952–1954.

Hans Puttnies, professor of communication studies, author, photographer and film maker, became friends with Freund, after he wrote a review on a German edition of her original dissertation in 1968.

Freund became famous for her colour portraits of writers and artists, including Samuel Beckett, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, Henry Matisse, Marcel Duchamp and many others.