The Folkwang Museum in Essen is presenting, from November 28, 2025 to March 15, 2026, roughly 400 photographs as well as literary narratives, political reports, and photojournalistic reportage by Germaine Krull (1897-1985). The queer avant-garde photographer, writer, and reporter left behind a comprehensive body of work.
The show offers the full spectrum of her oeuvre, from her early studies in Munich in the 1910s to her late-period work. Krull was a chronicler of a tumultuous century, the museum noted, underscoring that it manages her estate.
The photographer had lived and worked in Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Paris before leaving Europe. In the French capital, she fell in love with a woman named Elsa. In 1927 she married the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens after Elsa had left Paris. In 1945 Krull went to Southeast Asia as a correspondent, later living in Thailand into the mid-1960s, and then moving on to India.
The show “Germaine Krull: Chien Fou” makes “her self-understanding and self-confidence as an artist, thinker, and woman” visible, the museum said. It traces how external circumstances—especially World War II—shaped her life and work and how Krull ultimately made a deliberate break from Europe.
Marcy Ellerton
