‘Chien fou’ — mad dog — was the nickname Germaine Krull acquired among fellow students in Munich during the First World War. She kept it, and adopted it as an alter ego. It supplies both the title of this volume and its organising instinct: a life that rarely stood still.

Krull (1897–1985) is usually remembered as one of the avant-garde’s most restless photographers, but she wrote constantly. Chien Fou: Selected Writings gathers manifestos, political essays and memoirs composed between the 1920s and the 1980s; most are published here for the first time. Together they form an account of the twentieth century written from inside its artistic upheavals.

The texts follow her across the creative communities of the Bavarian Soviet Republic and interwar Paris, her participation in the French Resistance via Brazil and Equatorial Africa, and her later decisions to settle in Thailand, then India. Photographs and archival materials run throughout, but they serve the argument rather than replacing it.

Kerstin Meincke and Petra Steinhardt edited the collection; MACK publishes it with Museum Folkwang, Essen, alongside an exhibition running 28 November 2025 to 15 March 2026. The book appears in English, German and French editions; the English paperback runs to 320 pages.

For collectors, the interest lies in what the volume does to a familiar reputation. Krull’s photographs have long been studied; her prose has not. Reading her essays and recollections beside her images restores the political and intellectual commitments that shaped when she raised a camera and when she put it down. It is a book about how a photographer thought, assembled from her own words.