Museum Folkwang in Essen has opened a major retrospective devoted to Germaine Krull, the avant-garde photographer and writer whose career traced the turbulent course of the twentieth century. The exhibition frames Krull not as a footnote to European modernism but as one of its most prolific and peripatetic figures — a photographer who worked across continents, genres and political regimes, and who published as fluently as she shot.

The museum's own description casts her as a "chronicler of an eventful century," a label that captures both the range of her output and the restlessness of her biography. Krull belongs to that generation of interwar photographers who turned the camera into an instrument of formal experiment and reportage at once, and Museum Folkwang — an institution with a long history of collecting photography as fine art — is a fitting venue for a full-scale reassessment of her oeuvre.

Who was Germaine Krull?

Krull's name belongs beside the great figures of the photographic avant-garde. She was:

• A photographer of the modern industrial world, whose images of steel, machines and urban structure helped define the visual language of the New Vision
• A writer and essayist who argued for photography's place in modern culture
• A working professional across Europe and beyond, moving through the century's upheavals rather than observing them from a fixed position

That double identity — image-maker and author — sits at the heart of the Folkwang presentation. The retrospective treats her texts and photographs as parts of a single project: documenting, and at times mythologising, the accelerated modernity of her age.

What does the retrospective foreground?

The exhibition's curatorial premise is biography as photographic history. Krull's movements across borders mirror the century's own dislocations, and the show reconstructs her trajectory through the bodies of work she produced along the way. Museum Folkwang's presentation gives viewers the sweep of a career that resisted any single national school or market.

For an institution like Folkwang, the show also does institutional work. Retrospectives of women photographers of the avant-garde have reshaped the canon over recent decades, correcting a historiography that long centred on their male contemporaries. Placing Krull at this scale positions Essen alongside the museums now treating interwar photography as a central, not peripheral, strand of modern art.

Why does this exhibition matter now?

Krull's stock among historians has risen steadily, but large museum surveys remain rare. A retrospective at Museum Folkwang gives audiences the chance to assess her whole arc — the formal daring, the reportage, the writing — rather than the handful of anthology images through which most viewers know her. It also invites a critical question the exhibition implicitly raises: how much of Krull's reputation rests on a few icons of the avant-garde, and how much on the sheer endurance of a career that kept reinventing itself?

The Folkwang show suggests the latter is the truer measure. A photographer who survived and kept working through the century's ruptures, and who documented them as she went, earns the museum's label of chronicler.

Whether the retrospective travels beyond Essen, it marks a significant step in the institutional consolidation of Krull's reputation — and a signal that Museum Folkwang intends to keep expanding the historical account of photographic modernism it presents to its public.