Black in White America

On NPR you can see a short piece with 11 images about the re-issue by the J. Paul Getty Museum of the book Black In White America,  by photojournalist Leonard Freed. He is one of nine photographers featured in their Los Angeles show from opening June 29 (until November 14, 2010) “Engaged Observers: Documentary Photography Since The Sixties” which also includes work by Lauren Greenfield, Philip Jones Griffiths, Mary Ellen Mark, Susan Meiselas, James Nachtwey, Sebastião Salgado, W. Eugene and Aileen M. Smith, and Larry Towell. As yet there is little about it on their site.

You can see more about Freed (1929-2006) on the Magnum site, where as well as his photographer pages there is also a Magnum in Motion tribute.  Looking through the 171 images from Black in White America there shows a really impressive body of work.

You can also of course see many of his other pictures, with some of the strongest coming from his book ‘Police Work’. There are altogether  16 of his features on the Magnum site, the earliest pictures from New York in the 1950s  and the latest on Liberian refugees in the Ivory Coast in 1995. A truly remarkable career.

It was three years later that I had the privilege of attending a photographic workshop with him at Duckspool.  You can hear him talking about his pictures in a couple of videos on You Tube, Part 1 and Part 2. Although I admired his work, he wasn’t a person I really warmed to, but he had some interesting stories to tell both with his camera and about his life. Though it was the work with the camera that was of real importance.

The review that I wrote about that workshop is still on line on the Duckspool site, although Peter Goldfield who ran the workshops is sadly no longer with us. This is one of the pictures from it that I took on the workshop (though now I might make a better scan!)

© 1998, Peter Marshall
Peter Marshall – taken on a Freed workshop

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