Leonard Freed; Guardian obituary
Hyfler/Rosner
Photographer who documented the struggles of ordinary people
from protesting black Americans to North Sea oil workers
Amanda Hopkinson
Wednesday December 6, 2006
Guardian
The name of the American Leonard Freed, who has died aged
77, became synonymous with that of the "concerned
photographer". In the wake of the second world war,
photojournalism became increasingly involved with human
rights and, in Freed's case, with civil rights in his
homeland. As a documentarist of the situation of
African-Americans, he always had an eye for the unexpected
and upbeat, often in the grimmest of circumstances.
He followed the years of struggle against segregation and
discrimination by the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), photographing Martin
Luther King Jr and his great march across the US from
Alabama to Washington; equally, his image of children
playing around a water hydrant in New York became an icon,
along with those of daily life in that city, still
effectively segregated by ghettoisation in the 1950s and
60s.
Freed spent years photographing behind the scenes with the
police department in the 1970s; when his famous resulting
exhibition, The Spectre of Violence, was shown at London's
Photographers' Gallery in 1973 it was as though the viewers
were coming upon the actual scene of a murder. They entered
the gallery through black curtains, and a flash went off as
they found a corpse at the bottom of a stairwell; the
surrounding scenes were mounted on hardboard backing,
dramatically involving the audience in a lifesized
restaging.
Stylistically, this series was in the arresting, flashlit
tradition of an earlier New York photographer, Weegee
(Arthur Fellig). But 1972 was also the year in which Freed
joined Magnum, the Paris-based photo agency founded in 1948
by Bob Capa, George Rodger, "Chim" Seymour and Henri
Cartier-Bresson. It was to be a lifelong relationship, for
Magnum photographers have always adhered to their own
humanistic precepts and social awarenesses.
Preferring - like most of his fellow Magnum members - to
work in black and white, and using available light, Freed
contributed to the key picture magazines of the postwar
period, including Life, Look, Fortune, Libération,
L'Express, GEO, Paris-Match, Die Zeit, Der Spiegel and the
Sunday Times magazine. He also shot four films for Dutch,
Belgium and Japanese television, including The Negro in
America (1968) and Joey Goes to Wigstock (1992).
Born into a humble Jewish family of East European extraction
in Brooklyn, Freed originally wanted to become an artist. He
attended the New School and studied with the legendary art
director of Harper's Bazaar, Alexey Brodovitch - and it was
in Brodovitch's "design laboratory" that Freed discovered
his true vocation. As soon as he finished his studies, he
took off for two years, hitch-hiking through Europe and
north Africa. This led in 1959 to his first book, Joden von
Amsterdam (Jews of Amsterdam), a first one-man photo
exhibition, at Hilversum in the Netherlands, and his
decision to become a full-time freelancer shortly
afterwards.
The interest in the Jewish diaspora and in Israel became a
revisited theme for Freed. In 1965 he published Deutsche
Juden Heute (German Jews Today), and in 1967 and 1973 he
covered the six-day and Yom Kippur wars in the Middle East.
There followed Black and White in America (1968); Seltsame
Spiele (Strange Games, together with Shinkichi Tajiri,
1970); Made in Germany (1970); Police Work (1980; expanded
as New York Police, 1990); and a major retrospective work,
Leonard Freed: Photographies 1954-1990 (1991).
Exhibitions accompanied and alternated with the books and
films. These ranged from What is Man?, shown at the
Benedictine convent at Cockfosters, north London, to Native
Americans, a group show at the state capitol building in
Albany, New York. The former was cast in the mould of The
Family of Man, Edward Steichen's travelling exhibition which
intended to demonstrate, less than a decade after the second
world war, that "People are people the world over:
everywhere different and everywhere the same." Perhaps What
is Man was Freed's response to Steichen, who, as director of
the Museum of Modern Art, had first told Freed that he was
one of the three best emerging photographers he had met.
Purchasing three images for his prestigious collection
there, Steichen warned Freed that the other two had "turned
commercial" and that he should either remain an amateur or
"preferably, become a truck driver".
Clearly, Freed chose neither option, determining instead to
turn his vocation into a career. At the 1967 opening of the
Concerned Photographer exhibition, curated by Cornell Capa
and in which he showed with five of his peers, he announced:
"Suddenly, I feel as if I belong to a tradition. To see
life, see the world, be witness to great events, peer into
the faces of the poor, the mad, to understand the shadows of
the jungle, hidden things, to see, to rejoice in seeing, to
be spiritually enriched." It was a journey that took him to
document Asian immigrants in Newcastle and oil workers in
the North Sea, travellers in eastern Europe and Hassidic
communities and black people in New York slums - always
pursuing content and context over form and subjectivity.
Sue Davies, founder director of London's Photographers'
Gallery, has informal memories of how Freed spent time in
London in the early 1970s - "in my family album I have a
picture he took at a wedding reception of my husband John
waving a chicken leg in the air."
Jimmy Fox, picture editor at Magnum's Paris office, recalls
the small, dark, crinkle-haired man with big glasses thus:
"During 38 years Leonard Freed was always polite, efficient,
cooperative and smiling. He was open to other opinions and
had a great interest in human behaviour, without being
malicious or self-appropriating. The description 'Concerned
photographer' fitted him like a glove."
Freed himself claimed that "Photography is still in its
infancy ... challenging in that [it leaves] one free to be
original." But, in truth, he and his Magnum colleagues are
among those who brought the medium to maturity. He is
survived by his wife, Brigitte Klueck, whom he married in
1958, and daughter Elke.
· Leonard Freed, photographer, born October 23 1929; died
November 11 2006