Gisèle was a German-born French photographer, famous for her documentary photographs and portraits of writers and artists. Her best-known book is Photographie et société (1974), about the uses and abuses of the photographic medium.

Freund was born near Berlin to a wealthy Jewish family. Her father was a keen art collector with an interest in the work of photographer Karl Blossfeldt, who was producing his close-up studies exploring the forms of natural objects. Freund's father gave her a Leica camera as a present for her high school graduation. At university she became an active member of a student socialist group and was determined to use photography as an integral part of her socialist practice.

In 1933, with Hitler taking over she was doubly threatened as a socialist activist and also as a Jew, and managed to escape to Paris, her negatives strapped around her body to get them past the border guards.

Freund's dissertation was published in book form by Adrienne Monnier (1892-1955).One of her best-known early works shows one of the last political street demonstrations in Germany before Hitler took power.

With Monnier's help, Freund married a Frenchman named Pierre Blum (or Bloom) in order to obtain a visa to remain in France legally. They divorced within a few years. Armed with her new papers, Freund took a job as a photojournalist with Life magazine, which published "Northern England," her acclaimed photodocumentary of economic hardship in Britain, on December 14, 1936.

Many of the artists Freund photographed during those years were her friends, and many, like Freund, were gay or lesbian, living and loving with a relative openness that would not be seen again for many decades.