What's Black and White and Read All Over?

The documentary photography of jill freedman.

- Jack Neubart

JILL FREEDMAN IS NOT ONE OF THOSE NAMES that readily rolls off the tongue when we discuss documentary photography. But it should be. Her documentary photographs are as real, as telling, as poignant as it gets. They are moments captured in a style all her own, albeit with the same measure of truth as a Dorothea Lange portrait of life during the Great Depression. In fact, the photographs of Lange, along with those of W. Eugene Smith and André Kertész, would shape Freedman’s photographic viewpoint.

For that matter, Freedman asserted, “I wish there would have been an FSA (Farm Security Administration) in my time, because that would have been an issue for me to portray as a photographer.” She was referring to Lange’s pictorial chronicles of migrant farm workers and the deplorable conditions they’d had to endure.

CHOOSING PHOTOGRAPHY AS A CAREER Unlike Lange, however, Freedman did not have any formal training in art and photography. For her, a desire to take pictures came almost as an epiphany, after brewing in her mind for some time.

She writes on her website: “When I was seven I found old Life Magazines in the attic. My parents had kept the ones from the war and for a year I used to go up there after school, look at the pictures, cry, then go play softball. When my parents realized that I had found them and how they affected me, they burned them, but it was too late, those pictures had burned into my brain.”

Still, as the years went by, Freedman could not find her path in life. She had graduated college, traveled through Europe literally “singing for her supper,” as she described it, and returned to New York with no clear direction.