--- issue: 8 date: 2024-01-01 categories: varia ref: 08-16 open-access: 1 layout: page lang: en author: - "Gaëlle Morel" title: "Germaine Krull, “The Terrible Banishing of France” (1941)" subtitle: "The Development of a Photographic Essay" pages: "182-193" caption: Germaine Krull, quartiers des prisonniers, « Île du Diable », bagne de la Guyane française, 1941, tirage argentique, 20,3 × 25,4 cm. Toronto, The Image Centre, Black Star Collection. © Estate Germaine Krull, Museum Folkwang, Essen bio: "Gaëlle Morel has a doctorate in art history and is a curator of exhibitions at the Image Centre, Toronto Metropolitan University, Canada. She has recently published “Community and Joy. The Visual Typology of the ArQuives’ Photography Collection” (in *Joy. Sorrow. Anger. Love. PRIDE*, 2023) and “Mona, Beth, Laurie, and the Others: Ward 81” (in Mary Ellen Mark et Karen Folger Jacobs, *Ward 81: Voices*, 2023). She curated the exhibition “Lee Miller. A Photographer at Work (1932– 1945)”, presented in 2022 at the Rencontres de la photographie d’Arles, and which will be inaugurated in September 2024 at Toronto’s Image Centre." abstract: "In 1941, while the German photographer Germaine Krull (1897–1985) was on her way to Brazil, she stopped off in Saint-Laurent-du-Maroni, French Guiana, for a few days. She photographed the penal colony and the convicts who had remained there despite the official closure of the prison, but regardless of the relatively dramatic character of her subject, the reportage was never published in the press. Some of the images and an introductory text, however, were recently discovered in the archives of the Black Star collection in Toronto’s Image Centre, and make it possible to identify and analyse in detail the stages in the development of an investigative story by an experienced press photographer.This study is part of a historical approach dedicated to revealing the collaborative methodology that underlies the production of visual information. Without forsaking biographical accounts, this methodological departure resists strictly auteurist conceptions and reassesses the importance of the context in which images are produced, used and exchanged, as well as the role played by professional organisations. Viewed as a collective practice, press photography can then be redefined as a complex system of operators and networks, rather than as a collection of images taken by a small number of exceptional practitioners." keywords: "photojournalism, photoreportage, Black Star, penal colony, French Guiana, Germaine Krull"