Inherently a modern medium, photography has offered freedom from the patriarchal traditions inherent to more traditional art forms, giving women opportunities to establish their economic and aesthetic independence. Photographers like Germaine Krull (1897–85) and Gisèle Freund (1908–2000) rose to that challenge to take photographs that placed them at the center of Parisian avant-garde. Krull’s photo of Métro tracks exemplifies the innovations she displayed in Métal (1928), a landmark photographic book that brought her modernist vision to the industrial landscape. She applied the same eye for abstraction to her portraits, as seen in her image of Louis Jouvet, where the famed actor partially obscures his face in a dramatic gesture. Freund is represented in Her Gaze by photographs in which she captured the liveliness of Parisian urban fabric and street life. The only founding female member of the international photographer co-operative agency Magnum, Freund became the first photographer to be honoured with a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in 1991.