Marseille
Germaine Krull / André Suarès
Bibliographic Details
| Author | Germaine Krull, André Suarès |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Éditions d'Histoire et d'Art - Librairie Plon |
| Place of publication | Paris |
| Year | 1935 |
| Edition | First edition |
| Binding | Softcover |
| Language | French |
| Dimensions | 29 x 22,5 |
| Collation | 42 pp. |
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Marseille: Germaine Krull’s Port City in Heliogravure
Germaine Krull’s Marseille joins 49 black-and-white photographs to prose by Marseille-born writer André Suarès. Published in Paris in 1935 by Éditions d’Histoire et d’Art–Librairie Plon, the first edition is a large illustrated softcover printed in heliogravure. First-edition records establish the imprint, format, process and image count (Ader; ALDE).
The book is best understood not as a set of detached city views but as an edited portrait of circulation. Quays, cranes, ships, bridges, façades, markets, streets and people form a connected urban system. Krull repeatedly shifts between industrial structure and street-level incident, while Suarès supplies a second, literary Marseille shaped by history, metaphor and memory.
Krull before the book
Krull (1897–1985) studied photography in Munich, opened studios there and in Berlin, worked in the Netherlands and settled in Paris in 1926. Manifesta 13 Marseille’s biography traces her work in fashion and illustrated magazines, her participation in the 1929 Film und Foto exhibition and the role of Métal (1927–28) in establishing her as a leading New Vision photographer in France. It also records her move to southern France, work for local newspapers and publication of Marseille with Suarès in 1935 (Manifesta 13 Marseille).
Her visual engagement with Marseille began before the book. MoMA holds works titled Marseille from 1930, and the Centre Pompidou identifies Vue prise du pont transbordeur, Marseille as a circa-1926 New Vision photograph structured by the port, boat, metal framework and a steep downward viewpoint (MoMA; Centre Pompidou). The 1935 publication therefore develops a subject Krull had studied over years rather than documenting a single visit.
Infrastructure and daily life
The transporter bridge is an ideal Krull subject: engineering becomes both working infrastructure and graphic form. Angled viewpoints turn steel members, harbour equipment and ships into dynamic relations of line and mass. Yet the book does not isolate modern machinery from the city that uses it. Markets, pedestrians, washing, narrow streets and crowds interrupt the monumental views. Marseille’s modernity emerges through friction between systems and inhabitants.
This movement between scales is central to the sequence. A harbour panorama establishes distance; a nearby street scene restores texture and contingency. The page turn links forms that would remain separate in a portfolio. Krull’s Marseille is industrial but not abstract, lived-in but not reduced to anecdote.
Suarès’s second Marseille
André Suarès (1868–1948) was a Marseille-born French poet, essayist, dramatist and critic (FranceArchives). His contribution does not merely caption what the camera shows. A discussion of the 2013 reprint notes the scarcity of chronological markers and descriptive legends and quotes his personification of harbour cranes as thin iron bodies with skeletal arms and hooked fingers (Actuphoto).
That metaphor meets Krull’s attraction to steel while remaining a distinct act of writing. Image and prose do not collapse into one explanation. The photographs attend to surface, work, movement and viewpoint; the text supplies voice, historical depth and emotional cadence. Their partial disagreement is productive: the book presents a documentary city and an imagined city at once.
Heliogravure and sequence
Heliogravure is part of the book’s argument. Its tonal range accommodates deep blacks in machinery and street shadows while retaining atmospheric distance in harbour scenes. The process also gives consistency to photographs made across different moments. Printed on the page and arranged around Suarès’s prose, the images become a paced experience rather than a stack of prints.
Page counts for the first edition vary among cataloguers, probably because the volume is unpaginated and leaves, printed pages and wrappers are counted differently. The 1935 Plon imprint, illustrated wrappers, format, 49 photographs, heliogravure printing and Suarès collaboration are more reliable identification points than an isolated pagination claim.
First edition and reprint
The original should be distinguished from the 2013 Jeanne Laffitte reprint, described as a 64-page edition with 49 photographs in a 22 × 29.5 cm format (Actuphoto). Those modern specifications should not be transferred to the 1935 object. Likewise, inscriptions or inserted photographs belong only to the individual copies in which they occur; a dealer record describing such additions is useful precisely because it marks them as copy-specific (Földvári Books).
Marseille remains a focused example of the modern photographic city book. Krull turns port infrastructure, street life and changing viewpoints into visual rhythm; Suarès answers with a city made of language and memory. Heliogravure and sequence hold those two Marseilles together without erasing their differences.
