Marseille

Germaine Krull’s Marseille is a 1935 first-edition photobook pairing her black-and-white photographs with writing by Marseille-born author André Suarès. Éditions d’Histoire et d’Art–Librairie Plon published it in Paris as an illustrated softcover, approximately 29.5 × 22.5 cm, with the photographs reproduced in heliogravure (Ader). A specialist auction record counts 49 photographs in the first edition (ALDE).

The catalogue record describes its copy as a 42-page French softcover measuring 29 × 22.5 cm. Other catalogues variously give 47 or 48 pages, probably because the book is unpaginated and cataloguers count leaves, printed pages, or covers differently. For identification, the 1935 Plon imprint, format, wrappers, heliogravure images, and collaboration with Suarès are more dependable than a bare page total.

Krull and the New Vision

Germaine Krull (1897–1985) was one of the major photographers associated with the New Vision. Manifesta’s biography traces her photographic training in Munich, work in Berlin and the Netherlands, move to Paris in 1926, and participation in the influential Film und Foto exhibition in Stuttgart in 1929. It identifies Métal (1927–28), with its bridges, towers, and industrial structures, as the book that established her as a principal representative of the New Vision in France (Manifesta 13 Marseille).

MoMA’s collection record situates Krull within avant-garde photography, photojournalism, photomontage, and the portfolio form. It also holds two works titled Marseille, dated 1930 and June 1930, evidence that her visual engagement with the city preceded the book’s publication (MoMA).

In the early 1930s Krull settled in southern France and worked for local newspapers. Her Marseille appeared in 1935 with Suarès’s text (Manifesta 13 Marseille). The port was a natural subject for an artist already drawn to bridges, machinery, movement, and the graphic possibilities of steel.

Port, street, and circulation

The book treats Marseille as both physical structure and lived city. Quays, cranes, ships, bridges, façades, streets, markets, and crowds form a connected urban system. Krull’s angled viewpoints and abrupt changes of scale make infrastructure feel active: steel frames and harbour equipment are not static monuments but parts of work, trade, and passage.

The transporter bridge (pont transbordeur) is central to this visual vocabulary. Manifesta illustrates Krull’s treatment of the structure from the Musée Cantini collection, while MoMA’s two Marseille prints show that the city was already part of her work around 1930 (Manifesta 13 Marseille; MoMA). In the book, however, monumental engineering is counterbalanced by ordinary street life. The city’s modernity emerges from the relation between infrastructure and people.

Suarès and the double portrait

André Suarès (1868–1948) was a French poet, essayist, dramatist, and critic born in Marseille; the national FranceArchives portal records his dates, literary activities, and French nationality (FranceArchives). His contribution gives the photobook a second voice rooted in the city’s history and temperament.

The text does not function as an inventory of captions. A review of the 2013 Jeanne Laffitte reprint explains that the reader receives few chronological signposts or descriptive legends; Suarès’s words instead punctuate Krull’s images. It quotes his metaphor for harbour cranes as thin iron bodies with skeletal arms and hooked fingers, a literary image that meets Krull’s attraction to industrial form (Actuphoto).

This interaction produces two Marseilles without forcing them into complete agreement. Krull’s camera attends to viewpoint, surface, labour, and movement; Suarès’s prose supplies history, personification, and emotional cadence. Image and text remain distinct but mutually intensifying.

Heliogravure and book form

Heliogravure is not a minor production detail. Ader’s first-edition record identifies the process, and ALDE confirms 49 photographs reproduced that way (Ader; ALDE). Its tonal depth suits Krull’s combination of hard industrial geometry, atmospheric distance, and dark street detail.

The book is consequently more than a portfolio of city views. Page turns create shifts between harbour panorama and street-level incident; Suarès’s passages interrupt and redirect the photographic sequence. The cover’s photographic image, flexible binding, large page, and gravure printing turn the city portrait into a deliberately paced object.

Edition and collecting points

Collectors should distinguish the original Paris edition—Éditions d’Histoire et d’Art–Librairie Plon, 1935—from the 2013 Jeanne Laffitte reprint. The latter is explicitly described as a reprint of the Paris 1935 edition and has 64 pages, 49 photographs, and a 22 × 29.5 cm format (Actuphoto). Those specifications should not be transferred wholesale to the original.

For the first edition, the illustrated wrappers and spine are vulnerable to rubbing, splits, fading, and loss. A copy should also be checked for completeness, internal spotting, page repairs, and any later rebinding. If the wrappers have been bound into a later case, that fact belongs in the description. Inscription or inserted photographs, when present, require provenance rather than assumption; one dealer record, for example, describes an inscribed copy with two vintage photographs inserted, a copy-specific feature rather than a standard issue point (Földvári Books).

Why it matters

Marseille joins New Vision photography to the literary city book. Its historical value is not limited to showing the port in the 1930s. Krull’s angles, framing, and sequence translate circulation and labour into modern form, while Suarès turns the same city into language charged by memory and civic character.

The result is a double portrait—documentary and poetic, infrastructural and intimate. In heliogravure, Krull’s Marseille becomes a city of deep blacks, steel lines, weather, crowds, and passage: a compact demonstration of how the modern photobook can make place through printing, sequence, and the friction between photographs and prose.

Sources

• Ader first-edition record
• ALDE first-edition record
• Germaine Krull, Manifesta 13 Marseille
• Germaine Krull, MoMA
• André Suarès, FranceArchives
• 2013 reprint review, Actuphoto
• Copy-specific dealer record, Földvári Books