Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 10/19/1939
WEBSITE: http://www.jillfreedman.com/
CITY: New York
STATE: NY
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY: American
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | n 81035403 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/n81035403 |
| HEADING: | Freedman, Jill |
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| 001 | 3780103 |
| 005 | 20171129073338.0 |
| 008 | 810420n| azannaabn |n aaa |
| 010 | __ |a n 81035403 |
| 035 | __ |a (OCoLC)oca00581053 |
| 040 | __ |a DLC |b eng |e rda |c DLC |d DLC |d OCoLC |d CMalG |d HU |
| 046 | __ |f 1939 |2 edtf |
| 100 | 1_ |a Freedman, Jill |
| 370 | __ |a Pittsburgh (Pa.) |e New York (N.Y.) |2 naf |
| 372 | __ |a Documentary photography |a Photojournalism |2 lcsh |
| 374 | __ |a Photographers |2 lcsh |
| 375 | __ |a Females |2 lcdgt |
| 670 | __ |a Her Old news: Resurrection City, 1970. |
| 670 | __ |a Her A time that was, c1987: |b CIP t.p. (Jill Freedman) data sheet (b. Oct. 19, 1939) CIP info. (photojournalist) |
| 670 | __ |a Resurrection City, 1968, 2017: |b title page (Jill Freedman) page 169 (born 1939 in Pittsburgh; New York City documentary photographer) |
| 952 | __ |a RETRO |
| 953 | __ |a xx00 |b bt10 |
PERSONAL
Born October 19, 1939, in Pittsburgh, PA.
EDUCATION:Majored in sociology in college.
ADDRESS
CAREER
New York City documentary photographer.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Award-winning documentary photographer Jill Freedman is known for her New York City street photography reminiscent of the styles of André Kertész, Dorothea Lange, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. Freedman’s work has been featured in solo and group exhibitions around the world, and is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, International Center of Photography, George Eastman House, Smithsonian Institution, New York Public Library, and Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris. She has published numerous collection of her photography. Introduced to the power of photography from seeing the pictures in Life magazine as a child, Freedman holds a sociology degree and is a self-taught photojournalist. On her Jill Freedman website, she exclaimed: “Photography is magic. You can stop time itself. Catch slivers of moments to savor and share time and again. Tell beautiful silver stories, one photo alone, or many playing together to form a book. A photograph is a sharing, it says ‘Hey, look at this!’”
Old News
Freedman’s Old News: Resurrection City, published in 1970, documents the six-week Poor People’s Campaign protest of 1968 organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. The 2018 reissue Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968 commemorates the fiftieth-anniversary of the march. After King’s death, Freedman quit her copywriting job and joined the Civil Rights movement, attending the Poor People’s Campaign and taking pictures even though she was not a professional photographer. The book highlights the significance of the protests, the encampments set up to house protesters, and essays by John Edwin Mason, historian of African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia, and Aaron Bryant, curator of photography at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, who put the message into contemporary context.
Photos bring to light poverty yet also a sense of camaraderie among the protesters. A Publishers Weekly reviewer commented: “This powerful work of documentary photography captures the momentum of the civil rights movement through one of its lesser known demonstrations.” In a review in New York Times, Maurice Berger remarked: “These photographs present a measured view of a historical event that has been more typically labeled a failure by journalists and scholars. The campaign resulted in little substantive change in federal policy.”
Freedman’s choice to photograph the common people rather than the celebrity speakers offers a grounded view of the protest. John Edwin Mason explained on the Time website: “She offers instead portraits of ordinary people—the women, men and children who were the unheralded heroes of the movement. Freedman’s people are the ones with the muddiest shoes and wettest clothes, the people with the most to gain and most to lose. Her refusal to concentrate on protests and charismatic leaders challenges her viewers. She asks her audience to see the dignity and humanity amid the grime, the anger, and the rain.”
Circus Days
In 1975, Freedman published Circus Days, a photographic documentation of the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus. In 1971 she followed the circus in a Volkswagen bus for two months along the East Coast, detailing the customs, activities, clowns, animals, and personalities of a rapidly declining way of life. Her ability to form a personal connection with the circus people helped her obtain candid photos of a variety of emotions, from playful veneer to tired faces, and creepy made-up clown faces. “She found a chosen family, many of them outsiders who joined up for better pastures,” Cameron Cuchulainn reported online at Vice.
Many of the photos are grim, showing the cruel treatment of the animals and the claustrophobic living conditions for the animals and the humans. “Subtlety is not the goal here, as one photograph goes in close to the chain around the elephant’s leg, and is installed next to another shot zoomed in on its surprisingly small and mournful eye surrounded by wrinkled flesh,” declared Allison Meier on the Hyperallergic website.
Street Cops
In her 1981 book Street Cops, Freedman focuses on the men and women in blue of the Ninth Precinct as they make their daily rounds, highlighting the gritty streets of the late 1970s with hookers, hustlers, thieves, addicts, and runaways. Noting the quality and consistency of the photographs, reviewer Loring Knoblauch explained on the Collector Daily website: “While she doesn’t flinch from showing us the realism of blood and guts, her pictures avoid some of the harshness and voyeurism of Weegee [pseudonym of New York street photographer Arthur Fellig], focusing instead on the warmth of a gesture or the humor of an interaction.”
Following paired cops in tenement hallways and walking across cinder blocks, Freedman plays off facial expressions, cleverness of framing, laughter, body language, and narrative moods that tell stories. Pictures depict confrontations with derange people and cops waiting outside a door with guns drawn and holding lit cigars, “Freedman’s photographs show a New York City that’s far different than the one we know today. Weegee would have approved,” concluded Norman Borden online at New York Photo Review.
Jill's Dogs and Ireland Ever
Jill’s Dogs is Freedman’s 1993 ode to Fang, her dog who was one of her greatest motivations and inspirations for street photography in New York. When she was out walking with him, she saw and felt everything about the city. She explained that he had great instinct and taught her how to look and not miss anything. The book provides “an interesting insight into the world of the dog and a quirky, humorous take on the conventional idea of street photography,” according to Clare Davies online at Sleek.
Freedman’s 2004 Ireland Ever: The Photographs of Jill Freedman encompasses the Irish landscape and its people in duotone photographs. Expressive pictures feature a man rowing a boat in Dingle, an elderly man traveling with his mule and dogs in County Leitrim, music makers like fiddlers and singers, and the stone cliffs of The Burren in County Clare. Best-selling Irish-American authors, including Angela’s Ashes‘s Frank McCourt and Singing My Him Song‘s, Malachy McCourt, provide accompanying commentary. A Publishers Weekly reviewer thought that pictures of mud wrestlers and frat boys with dropped trousers distracted from the romantic vision of Ireland, nevertheless Freedman “succeeds in presenting a photo-journal that lovingly captures the enduring aspects of Irish tradition.” The reviewer also noted that it is unusual to see Ireland photographed in black and white rather than the green the country is associated with.
BIOCRIT
ONLINE
Collector Daily, https://collectordaily.com/(October 20, 2011), Loring Knoblauch, review of Street Cops; (November 10, 2017), review of Resurrection City.
Guernica, https://www.guernicamag.com/ (December 6, 2017), review of Resurrection City.
Hyperallergic, https://hyperallergic.com/ (February 14, 2013), Allison Meier, review of Circus Days.
Metropolitan, https://themetdet.com (February 8, 2018), review of Resurrection City.
New York Photo Review, http://www.nyphotoreview.com/ (October 25, 2011), Norman Borden, review of Street Cops.
New York Times Online, https://lens.blogs.nytimes.com/ (October 24, 2017), Maurice Berger, review of Resurrection City.
NPR, https://www.npr.org/ (June 21, 2008), review of Resurrection City.
PDN Photo of the Day, https://potd.pdnonline.com/ (March 13, 2108), review of Resurrection City.
Publisher’s Weekly Online, https://www.publishersweekly.com/ (August 1, 2018), review of Ireland Ever: The Photographs of Jill Freedman.
Sleek, http://www.sleek-mag.com/ (June 29, 2017), Clare Davies, “The Photobooks Every Budding Street Photographer Should Own,” review of Jill’s Dogs.
Smithsonian, https://www.smithsonianmag.com/ (May 1, 2018), review of Resurrection City.
Time Online, http://time.com/ (October 26, 2017), John Edwin Mason, review of Resurrection City.
Vice, https://www.vice.com/ (June 18, 2017), Cameron Cuchulainn, review of Circus Days; (October 30, 2017), review of Resurrection City.
Jill Freedman is a highly respected New York City documentary photographer whose award-winning work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, George Eastman House, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the New York Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, among others. She has appeared in solo and group exhibitions throughout the world, and has contributed to many prominent publications.
Jill Freedman is best known for her street and documentary photography, recalling the work of André Kertész, W. Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange, and Cartier-Bresson. She has published seven books: Old News: Resurrection City; Circus Days; Firehouse; Street Cops; A Time That Was: Irish Moments; Jill’s Dogs; and Ireland Ever. Jill Freedman lives and works on the Upper West Side of New York City.
The Joy of Photography
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.
Outwardly I was normal, but those images were always with me, and in my dreams. Even now I can see them, the man who had tried to escape the burning barn, the concentration camp. I majored in Sociology in college, then spent a few years traveling around Europe singing for my supper. I’d spend the days wandering around, searching for adventure, meeting all kinds of eccentric characters and loving their stories. When I ran out of money I’d sing again. I settled in New York, got a job, tried to figure out what I wanted to do. Something meaningful, not just work.
I was starting to worry. Then one day I woke up and wanted a camera. I borrowed one. I had never taken a picture before, and as soon as I held it in my hands it felt good. I never had the sense of holding a machine. I read the instructions, went out into the street, shot two rolls, had them developed. I was thunderstruck. It were as though I had been taking pictures for years, but in my head, without a camera. “That’s it,” I said. “I’m a photographer.” What a relief.
Photojournalism was always it for me. Those pictures in the attic had set my course. Those, and all the characters I’d met. To tell a story in the blink of an eye, have it printed so that millions of people could see it and wrap their fish in it, to have my pictures reach people the way those Life magazines had reached me, now that was doing something.
I am self taught. I got a copywriting job to support myself and I started learning, devouring books and looking at good work, walking a lot, and shooting. Those early years were fired with an intensity and passion I had never felt before. I was obsessed and driven. I thought about photography all of the time. And my pictures, if no one else had liked them, it wouldn’t have mattered, I loved them. Sometimes I’d look at them and think, What if I wake up one day and it’s gone? What if it goes away like it came?
With each paycheck I bought equipment and built a darkroom and when I finally made my first print, I was hooked for good. It was the first time that I had ever finished something I had started. My father used to say, “You blow hot and cold.” But it was magic, watching it come up in the developer. I still feel it. I worked hard, learning my craft.
I like to work two ways, either on a specific idea or just wandering around, getting lost, snapping. Eventually all the wanderings go together, and then I find out what I’ve been doing.
Photography is magic. You can stop time itself. Catch slivers of moments to savor and share time and again. Tell beautiful silver stories, one photo alone, or many playing together to form a book. A photograph is a sharing, it says “Hey, look at this!”, it’s a miracle, is what it is. And when you’re going good and you get a new picture you love, there’s nothing better. That’s the joy of photography, and the fun.
– Jill Freedman
Jill Freedman is a highly respected New York documentary photographer whose award-winning work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, George Eastman House, the Smithsonian Institution, the New York Public Library, and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, among others. Jill Freedman is best known for her NYC street and documentary photography, recalling the work of André Kertész, W. Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. She has published seven books: Old News, Circus Days, Firehouse, Street Cops, A Time That Was, Jill’s Dogs, and Ireland Ever.
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Leaning In | Fearless street photographer Jill Freedman
All access coverage
20 November, 2014
by Bob Ahern
Getty Images Archive Director
Director of the Getty Images Archive, Bob Ahern discusses the work of female street photographer Jill Freedman whose work documents life in New York City.
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178002403 / Jill Freedman / Getty Images
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Since the advent of our Lean In collection, we’ve been challenging the world to re-picture the visual stereotypes around women. Our weekly ‘Leaning In’ series sparks discussion around traditional concepts associated with gender. This week, Director of the Getty Images Archive, Bob Ahern discusses the work of street photographer Jill Freedman.
From riding with the NYPD documenting the underbelly of NYC in the 1970s to going shoulder to shoulder with the fire crews of the South Bronx, if you had to use just one word to describe photographer Jill Freedman, it might be fearless.
I had known of Jill’s work for many years but I first met her in early 2013, at Bemelmans Bar on the Upper East Side. We met to discuss contracts and whether Getty Images might rep her pictures, and it was clear right from the off that Jill was as straight talking as her reputation suggested. Pittsburgh born but at heart a New Yorker who had seen it all. And then a bit more. And as the cocktails kept coming, I also got the impression that this petite 74-year-old was going to drink me under the table.
She told me about her journey into photography, which, like the rest of her life proved unconventional. Having busked the streets of Europe for many years, she discovered photography: “I am self-taught. I got a copywriting job to support myself, and I started learning, devouring books and looking at good work, walking a lot, and shooting.” Her first self-assignment was covering the Poor People’s campaign in Washington DC in 1968 spending time amongst the protestors of the makeshift Resurrection City. It was quite a debut.
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By the 70s, she had hustled her way into accompanying the NYPD and in covering the darker side of life in the Lower East Side – the crime, drugs, poverty and the violence. She was an unflinching witness, and at times, almost a reluctant participant. Some have compared her to the great Weegee. Yet amongst the harshness and brutality, she recorded compassion and humour too: the good guys and the bad guys.
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And on the fire crews of the South Bronx…
“I’ve always admired them. They were for me the antithesis of all the meanness and cruelty you see in the papers and on the streets. There was an altruism in the very idea of a fireman that interested me. I wanted to see what they were like. What kind of guy will risk his neck for someone else’s? Will run into burning buildings, and feel responsible for every stranger who needs help?”
Women weren’t allowed unescorted in the firehouses after 10pm, so in addition to the grueling shifts to shoot alongside the fire fighters, Jill slept in the back seat of the Chief’s car, for a year – going home two nights a week to process her film. It was almost literally back-breaking stuff.
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Fast forward seven books, numerous exhibitions and a few decades later, and her archive has accumulated into a remarkable body of work. At her home in Harlem, there are boxes upon boxes of prints (she printed herself in her Thompson Street darkroom) showing life on the ever changing streets of New York. For years Jill shot the every-day too, finding the extraordinary in the ordinary in search of the perfect moment, the perfect frame. Telling it her way. If there is an accepted canon of street photography, Freedman is up there with the best.
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And in editing her photographs I come across the notebooks too. They are everywhere. Full of hand written quotes pulled from literature, politics, poets, or from the characters and eccentrics she has spent a lifetime seeking out. I sense an eighth book is on its way.
Archives like these don’t assemble themselves. They are not only the result of extraordinary talent, sometimes a calling even, but also impossible triumphs and disasters, sheer bloody-mindedness and hard work. Not to mention the dangers of working on the edge. And though she dabbled with agencies and assignments she never worked for long in a framework of support. Which makes her output all the more impressive. A singular vision, singularly executed.
Jill once said of the camera that, “It’s the only machine that can stop time itself,” celebrating it as a weapon of power and influence, and of course in the right hands it is.
So go on. Pick it up. And show the world what’s on your mind.
About Jill Freedman
Jill Freedman is a highly respected New York City documentary photographer whose award-winning work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, George Eastman House, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the New York Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, among others. She has appeared in solo and group exhibitions throughout the world, and has contributed to many publications. Jill Freedman is best known for her street and documentary photography, recalling the work of André Kertész, W. Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. She has published seven books: Old News: Resurrection City; Circus Days; Firehouse; Street Cops; A Time That Was: Irish Moments; Jill’s Dogs; and Ireland Ever.
Visit Jill Freedman’s website
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'I Love to See Men Cry': Interview With Jill Freedman, Street Photographer of the '70s and '80s
Austin Bryant
5/16/16 2:20pmFiled to: photography
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I found the photographer Jill Freedman on a packed subway car. I was doing what lots of people do during their commute to and from work—scrolling mindlessly through Instagram. Another photographer I follow re-posted one of her photos with something along the lines of: “Jill Freedman is on Instagram, finally.” I tapped through to her page and found mostly black and white photos of New York City over the past 40 years. After reaching the bottom of her profile, I knew I had to speak to her.
I’m lucky enough to have worked with and befriended a lot of photographers through my career, but there was something about Jill’s work particularly that drew me in. I read up on her as much as I could, and started to understand a profile of a prolific and probably under-celebrated woman documentary photographer from the 1970s. Photos of urban life of decades past make you imagine yourself there, imagine how things might be different. Freedman saw and documented a corner of New York life I wasn’t around for, and her photographs—a number of which you’ll see here—are organic and magnetic.
Avenue B block party, 1985.
Jill’s photography career spans several decades and personal milestones. She documented the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign in the wake of MLK’s death, slept in a firehouse for middle-of-the-night calls, traveled with the circus and followed cops on their beats. She has seen New York through five decades of gentrification, shifting neighborhoods and crime. Jill’s work can be found in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the New York Public Library, and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, among others.
Jill, now in her 70s, makes her home in Harlem. Lately, she’s been combing through her deep archives for future books and reaching a fresh batch of fans through her relatively new social media presence (especially on her increasingly popular Instagram account). After I initially reached out, we spoke several times, interrupted only by her assistant Stephen arriving with coffee or a quick puff of her inhaler. With a voice befitting her former life as a chain-smoker, Jill told me about her life’s work.
Jill Freedman.
“I was young once. Yes indeed.”
AB: What was your early life like?
JF: I grew up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, waiting to grow up to get to New York. I went to college there, high school, college. I majored in sociology, cultural anthropology. We had a little jazz group, tenor bass, tenor sax, and me. I was the vocalist, the girl singer. We used to sing at dances and a steelworker bar. It was really fun. Jazz is my love. We cut high school every Friday to go there.
After graduating from the University of Pittsburgh in ’61, I told them to send the diploma to my mother and I took a ship that left from New York. I was on the ocean for two weeks headed to Israel. I wanted to get out in the world.
Courtesy Jill Freedman. 1968.
Learning by traveling.
I always had travel lust. I took the first ship leaving and I was in Israel for 10 and a half months. First I was in the Kibbutz and learning the language. When I ran out of money, I became a singer. I had a guitar and seven chords that I knew how to play. I went and sang in Paris for a while and then ended up living two years in London, which I loved. I lived in London ‘62 to ‘64.
I came back to the U.S. at the end of ‘64 to figure out what I wanted to do, and then I just figured I’d get right back to London. I didn’t. I came back and I moved to New York, which is where I’d always wanted to be. And then... I fell in love with the city.
Church ladies, 1968.
Did you keep singing in New York?
No—I think it would be called a market research firm or something; you know, when they would get groups and have them write commercials and stuff. Then I would analyze the benchmark. Then I thought: “I can’t go through life without doing something that means something to me.” I had a friend that was a copywriter. He used to take me out twice a year to dinner, really expensive places. I thought, “This can’t be a bad gig.”
I was depressed for a couple of months trying to figure my life out, and then one day I woke up and out of nowhere I wanted a camera. A friend lent me his Pentax and I went right out in the street and shot a few rolls. I read the instructions, how you do it, etc. When I had them developed I realized, that’s it: I’m a photographer.
So, I worked as a copywriter for two years at a great agency in New York, Doyle Dane Bernbach [now DDB Worldwide]. It really taught me to write. I wrote some great ads. My first week there my copy chief took me and my art director to lunch, and I had my first two-martini lunch. Very grown-up. Sorry if I’m rambling.
Courtesy Jill Freedman. Abingdon Square Park, Manhattan, 1970.
Don’t worry about it. I love the stories.
I do, too. I guess we’re all good bullshitters. I could listen to a story anytime as long as it’s good. It doesn’t have to be true.
I think the reason I picked up the camera was because I was so against the war in Vietnam. In ‘65 I read all the pros and cons and I said, “Well of course we should not be there.” I wanted to shoot the anti-war stuff. It was a nation that was beginning to really protest.
Also, I think that way back when I was a kid I found Life magazines that my parents had put in the attic. They were the ones from the—I don’t know if it’s Bergen-Belsen [Nazi concentration camp], but the liberation of it. They had those pictures, and I never forgot the face on the pile of the corpses. There was a beautiful woman’s face on her skeleton body that they starved to death.
I used to look at those pictures when I was very little. After school I’d go up to the attic and look at them and cry, and then go play ball. After about a year my parents realized what I was doing and they burned the magazines. I think that that’s probably why in the end I wanted photography.
Stuff like that sticks with you.
It affected me so deeply. If I could take pictures like that, that would affect anyone the way those affected me, that’s doing something. That’s doing something with your life.
Ladies’ break room. 1986.
So how did you leave your job?
One day in Central Park I see a guy, and he’s wearing overalls and a straw hat. He’s got a mule. He might have been chewing on straw, who knows. He’s talking about the Poor People’s Campaign. This was right after they killed Dr. King. That was his latest project, and that’s what got him killed because he was talking rich and poor and against the Vietnam War. It was not just black and white civil rights; it was human rights.
I quit my job like an idiot. All these great flourishes: “Today, I’m a photographer.” They really loved me there and they knew I wanted to be a photographer because I showed them every week. With every paycheck I built up my darkroom and finally got a Nikon for my first camera.
So I went down to Washington for the Poor People’s Campaign in 1968. Dr. King had had a rally every day so that they couldn’t ignore us. You couldn’t just ride your train past us and not see us, all that. We were out in the street every day, demonstrating. It took a week marching down and sleeping in churches or people’s homes and then six weeks in the mud and shacks where it rained every day.
That became my first book, Old News: Resurrection City. I wanted to do it. I wanted to document it. I felt this would be the last big nonviolent demonstration and I wanted to be there.
“This is the Poor People’s Campaign, 1968, but in Paterson, New Jersey. The people were out on the street, watching us march on our way to Washington. So we marched through six different towns on the way down. We’d sleep in their homes and churches.” 1968.
You took the leap, and it obviously worked out for you in the end.
I got to follow my passion. Suddenly I went to a life of total uncertainty. On the other hand, I still have no boss. Nobody’s the boss of me. I was doing what I love.
What was it like living in New York at that time? You were in your late twenties.
It was fucking fantastic! There were all these cute guys around. You could work in the darkroom until midnight and then go out to the bar and find one. It was beautiful. It was great being a young woman in New York. As far as photography, I never considered myself a woman photographer, a female photographer.
“Greenwich Village, when it was still Greenwich Village before the yuppies decimated it. Bleecker and Sullivan. I lived on Sullivan, and that was caddy-corner to me. Those were two girls out for the day, and then an old fellow who came from the Mills Hotel around the corner. It’s a wonderful moment.” 1978.
You’re just a photographer.
I’m a photographer. I could shoot circles around most men, so it’s all bullshit. Although, it is a boys’ club and everything else really is. Women—you don’t see them exhibited or getting the gigs that men do. That’s just the way it is. Hold on, losing my breath a bit. Let me use my inhaler.
“I love to see men cry. I really do.”
After the publishing of Old News: Resurrection City in 1971, Freedman spent the rest of the ‘70s and early ‘80s shooting what ended up in several more books: 1975’s Circus Days, 1977’s Firehouse and 1982’s Street Cops. She spent those years putting herself in places that others wouldn’t necessarily care to be—filthy circus grounds, the boys’ clubs that were NYC firehouses and the drug-filled warzone that was then Times Square.
Courtesy Jill Freedman. 1976.
JF: I used to drink in a bar in the village called Lion’s Head. It was full of newspaper people. The Village Voice was around the corner, and a lot of guys from the papers would come and drink. It was a great bar full of great bullshitters. I knew a fireman that drank there occasionally and he had done a book. I thought, “Wow. That could be a really good story, about firemen.” I was so against that frigging war and I thought, what’s the opposite of a soldier going and killing people they don’t know? A fireman saving people they don’t know. I got permission, and finally ended up with a rescue team that covered all of the Bronx and Harlem.
What came next?
People were saying, “What are you going to do next after firemen? Cops?” I said, “Get out of here. I hate them!” because of Vietnam and all that. Then I would hear sirens and wonder what I was missing. I was like a retired fire horse. It killed me.
Finally I started thinking, “Wait a minute.” I’ve never seen a book about good cops. All the books I’ve read are about the bums, princes of the city, all the scumbags. What is the job simply of being a cop in a big city like New York, and why doesn’t our society work for a lot of people, probably most people. Simply, what is the job? Who are these guys? I dedicated this one to the good guys, the ones who care and try to help.
I started in Alphabet City, 9th Precinct Lower East Side, and it was really rough. When I was doing Firehouse it was when the Bronx was burning. I ended up doing doubles from 4 p.m. to 12 a.m. and then midnight to 8 a.m. I ended up in Midtown South—that’s Times Square, 42nd Street, when it was really still New York, still Times Square and all the sleaze you could want within one block. It was gorgeous before it became Disneyland and fast food.
Courtesy Jill Freedman. 1976.
I worked with cops I thought were good cops. That meant they had to have heart, a sense of humor, know the streets, be street smart, and some humanity.
I also love to drink and I used to drink them under the table. I used to get my best stories at 3 in the morning. I love to see men cry. I really do.
Fireman saves cat, 1973.
Was any part of it frightening? It had to be.
I was scared all the time with both [Firehouse and Street Cops]. I’m an adrenaline junkie like the rest of them. It was scary. This book, I made a distinction. I started off with a Hitchcock quote: “Don’t get too excited, it’s only a movie.” The point was this is not a movie or TV. You get shot in the gut, you turn gray. It’s not red like catsup. It’s gray like dead. You don’t talk for three minutes before they shoot you.
I really hate violence. I hate to see it the way it’s portrayed in film and TV. I just hate it. I’m really nonviolent because of Dr. King. I am nonviolent, but a killer in my heart. I stole that from Bernie.
Are you a big Bernie Sanders supporter?
Oh, yes. Definitely.
“That was a Roseland Ballroom matinee. In the evening, they had two bands—music that you could dance to. I think that was probably a Wednesday or Sunday matinee. The two men are fawning over the one woman, one trying to light her cig, and the other guy with the mustache and pinky ring looking at it all.” 1976.
The city was obviously a lot more dangerous back then. You must have seen a lot of gentrification.
The city now, it’s not the city. It’s a place for rich people. I’m glad I lived here. It was a small city because of all the neighborhoods. I’m doing that book now. I’ve started [posting] on my Facebook and on my Instagram.
You know, that’s how I found you! Instagram.
That’s great. I’ve been on it less than two months. I am loving it. I’m putting on a picture a day from all my archives. It’s so much fun, my God.
You get a lot of new people to see your work very quickly.
That’s what it’s about. You take a picture so people can see it. It’s a way of saying, “Hey, look at this!” Except it’s already gone. “Look at what?” “You missed it.” That’s what a photo is.
“Sisters,” courtesy Jill Freedman. 1976.
What do you think about people using mostly their phones to take pictures now?
I resisted all this at first because I said, I’m not going to have the visual garbage. I’m not going to do that because there’s so many crappy pictures. Really, to my loss. It was silly. I guess I wasn’t ready for it, which I am now. I’m pretty private. There can be very gregarious moments and then I enjoy reading and being alone and stuff. Now that I found it, I absolutely love it. I’m going to learn how to use the phone. In the meantime [my assistant], Stephen, I email him the image and he puts them up for me.
I think that the selfie thing is obnoxious. Total narcissism. They’ve gotten to the point where they’re not there, their phone is, the camera. They’re in a place that they don’t even see.
Speaking of selfies, do you mind sending me a photo of yourself for the post on Jezebel?
Stephen could send a scanned photo of me from ‘65. We just found it in an unmarked book… Stephen is emailing it now.
I got it! That was fast.
I really like this one! It really looks like…me.
Jill Freedman, 1965.
Austin Bryant is a freelance writer who has written for Kinfolk Magazine, Deadspin, Noisey and other places. He lives in Boston, Mass., and is pretty bad at Twitter.
Photos courtesy Jill Freedman. She’s on Instagram.
Jill Freedman
Jill Freedman is a highly respected New York City documentary photographer whose award-winning work is included in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, George Eastman House, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the New York Public Library, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, among others. She has appeared in solo and group exhibitions throughout the world, and has contributed to many prominent publications.
Jill Freedman is best known for her street and documentary photography, recalling the work of André Kertész, W. Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. She has published seven books: Old News: Resurrection City; Circus Days; Firehouse; Street Cops; A Time That Was: Irish Moments; Jill’s Dogs; and Ireland Ever. Jill Freedman lives and works on the Upper West Side of New York City.
Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968
Publishers Weekly.
265.6 (Feb. 5, 2018): p51+. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968
Jill Freedman, edited by Steven Kasher. Damiani (DAR dist.), $45 (176p) ISBN 978-88620-8583-0
1 of 2 7/1/18, 11:29 PM
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
In May of 1968, photographer Freedman documented the Poor People's Campaign, a six-week protest in Washington, D.C., organized by the Southern Leadership Conference. This photographic essay, originally published in 1971 and reissued to mark the 50 th anniversary of the protest, captures the significance of the event and lends it a contemporary context. The updated edition includes short essays by history professor John Edwin Mason and Aaron Bryant, curator of photography at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, both of which provide insight into the photographs and the protest itself, in which 3,000 people camped out on the National Mall from May 13 to June 24 in shacks made of plywood and canvas. In black-and-white photos, Freedman captures the mud and grime of the encampment. While there are signs of poverty throughout her photographs--an elderly woman wearing paper bags on her feet, a toothless man smiling at the camera--more striking is the sense of camaraderie among the residents, as seen in the photos of drum circles, kids wrestling with tire swings, groups of women sitting cross-legged on the lawn while singing and clapping their hands. This powerful work of documentary photography captures the momentum of the civil rights movement through one of its lesser known demonstrations. (Mar.)
Caption: Two of more than 3,000 demonstrators who camped out on the National Mall in Washington, D. C., in spring 1968, as part of the Poor People's Campaign, from Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968 (reviewedonp. 54).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968." Publishers Weekly, 5 Feb. 2018, p. 51+. Book Review
Index Plus, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A526810434/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=03323392. Accessed 2 July 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A526810434
2 of 2 7/1/18, 11:29 PM
Jill Freedman, Street Cops, 1978-1981 @Higher Pictures
By Loring Knoblauch / In Galleries / October 20, 2011
JTF (just the facts): A total of 27 black and white photographs, framed in white and matted, and hung in the small single room gallery space and the adjacent viewing alcove. All of the works are vintage gelatin silver prints, taken between 1978 and 1981. The images have been printed in one of two sizes: 11×14 (or reverse) or 20×24 (or reverse); there are 3 of the large size and 24 of the small size in the show. A monograph of this body of work, entitled Street Cops, was published by Harper & Row in 1981. (Installation shots at right.)
Comments/Context: Every collector takes his or her own often serendipitous path in learning about the history of photography, and depending on which books we read, which galleries we frequent, and who we talk to, we piece together an understanding of which photographers were important or influential and how it all fits together, framed by our own personal likes and dislikes. With each passing year, we refine this understanding by seeing new works, reevaluating ones we already know, and filling in gaps in our knowledge. While there may be a somewhat standard path for this learning, chance certainly plays some role in this ongoing educational process.
So while some of you will likely already be completely familiar with the work of Jill Freedman, until this show, I really wasn’t; perhaps I had run across a print or two here and there, but I hadn’t developed any real opinion on her photography. As a result, my reaction to this excellent show was all the more profound: where had Jill Freedman been hiding all these years, and why wasn’t she more well known? This exhibit of her Street Cops work is the first solo show of the work in New York since it was made more than 30 years ago, and when you see the quality and consistency of these prints, this fact will seem all the more remarkable and downright puzzling.
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In this project, Freedman followed the men and women in blue of the Ninth Precinct on their daily rounds, walking their beats and riding in their cars. The streets of late 1970s New York were a gritty place, with a never ending stream of hookers and hustlers, thieves and addicts, crazies and runaways to deal with, and her pictures are an intimate catalogue of crime scenes, accidents, and arrests. While she doesn’t flinch from showing us the realism of blood and guts, her pictures avoid some of the harshness and voyeurism of Weegee, focusing instead on the warmth of a gesture or the humor of an interaction. As such, they have more in common with the works of Levitt or Kertesz, where the turn of a head or the framing of a picture can create a feeling of sympathy or outright comedy. At a time when the reputation of the police force wasn’t particularly positive, Freedman found the human side to their work, the subtle kindness and compassion buried beneath bushy moustaches and long sideburns.
Almost all of her pictures turn on the play of a facial expression or the visual cleverness of the framing. Laughter, disbelief, skepticism, and concern, accompanied by the matching body language, give us the narrative moods and help to tell the stories of different kinds of confrontations. Paired cops slide down a cramped hallway and vault over a cinder block wall in perfect synchronization, while injured brothers hold each other shirtless like a pieta on a dingy sidewalk. This kind of photographic craftsmanship is on display again and again around the walls of this show; it’s not a parade of lucky shots, but instead a controlled example of a consistent vision and disciplined execution.
I came away from this exhibit thinking that this body of work could happily share a wall the best of 1970s street photography, especially in the context of what makes New York a unique place. As such, it certainly belongs in the collections of our local museums, both for its “snapshot of a time gone by” documentary power and for its relevance to the evolution of the artistic genre. This is one of the best shows of vintage work I have seen all year, so don’t wait another 30 years to rediscover this lesser known gem.
Collector’s POV: The prints in this show are priced as follows: the 11×14 prints are $6500 each, and the 20×24 prints are $13000 each. Freedman’s work is not widely available in the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the best option for interested collectors at this point.
Rating: *** (three stars) EXCELLENT (rating system described here)
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Street Shooter
Jill Freedman
Street Cops 1978-1981
Norman Borden
Street Cops by Jill Freedman. Source: higherpictures.com
Jill Freedman, "Street Cops" 1978
In an era when the New York City Police Department (NYPD) has an entire arsenal of high-tech weapons and techniques to fight crime and terrorism, seeing Jill Freedman’s gritty, in-your-face images of street cops on the job thirty years ago almost makes you wish for the good old days when it seemed easier to spot and take out the bad guys. After all, this was the period when Times Square was best known for its prostitutes, scam artists and porn palaces. This was the heyday of Alphabet City in the East Village, the junkie’s back yard. This was the New York that Jill Freedman captured so vividly in her much acclaimed book Street Cops 1978-81.
To get close to the action, Freedman talked her way into riding in the back of patrol cars in the Times Square area as well as downtown in the East Village. And these pictures showed that she went everywhere, from bloody murder scenes to the booking of a bank robber.
Small Change by Jill Freedman. Source: higherpictures.com
Jill Freedman, "Small Change" 1979
Freedman was a legendary street shooter back then, her acknowledged influences—Weegee and Diane Arbus—very evident in her work. And her ability to empathize with her subjects, whether they were cops or streetwalkers, made her pictures all the more realistic. This is quite apparent in many of the 27 vintage black and white prints from the book now on display at Higher Pictures, a gallery located in the tony section of Madison Avenue–not a neighborhood where you would have expected to find the decidedly down-to-earth and downtown Freedman.
The photographs in Street Cops transported me into a world most people don’t get to see —the scary confrontations with deranged people; or two cops waiting outside a door with guns drawn with one of them holding a lit cigar at his side; a bank robber being booked at the station house with cops all around laughing; a stabbing victim staring wide-eyed at the camera. Freedman’s pithy, descriptive captions (She had been an ad copywriter in a previous life) made the photographs more meaningful, i.e., a photo of a cop talking to a streetwalker is captioned “Pity the poor working girl.” Another photo/caption that I liked had a different point of view: Freedman is standing behind the perp, so we see two cops facing what could become a dangerous situation—the caption says, “Restraint.”
All in all, Jill Freedman’s photographs show a New York City that’s far different than the one we know today. Weegee would have approved.
Jill Freedman – “Jill’s Dogs”
Jill Freedman moved to New York in 1964. There she worked in advertising and used every single paycheck she earned to build up an impressive collection of photographic equipment, eventually procuring her own darkroom. Since the age of seven, Freedman had been obsessed with photography – her parents’ old copies of Life magazine fuelling her passion and encouraging her to teach herself as much as she could about the medium. Although completing no formal training, the budding photographer learned about her contemporaries, and became inspired by the likes of André Kertész, W. Eugene Smith, Weegee and Leonard Freed. An odd addition to this list of influencers, however, is the lesser-known, Fang, the poodle Freedman who ended up being one of her greatest motivations behind her street photography. “When I was out walking in the street with Fang I saw everything, felt everything”, she once stated. “He had a great instinct. He taught me how to look, because he never missed a thing”. Walks with her companion and her camera resulted in the unusual photojournalistic series “Jill’s Dogs” – a book that gives an interesting insight into the world of the dog and a quirky, humorous take on the conventional idea of street photography.
Ireland Ever: The Photographs of Jill Freedman
Jill Freedman, Photographer, Frank McCourt, Text by (Art/Photo Books), Malachy McCourt, Text by (Art/Photo Books) ABRAMS $29.95 (144p) ISBN 978-0-8109-4340-7
For a country so identified with the color green, it seems odd to photograph Ireland in black and white. Freedman's approach, however, brings out the spirit of the Irish people and landscape in less familiar ways. The stone cliffs and walls of The Burren in County Clare spread solidly over two pages, and a robust man sets off rowing under a darkened sky in Dingle. In her prefatory note, Freedman says she tries to get away from ""the ugly, noisy modern world"" when she visits Ireland, and instead seeks out people living as they have for ages. To this end, she photographs scenes such as an elderly man journeying with his mule and dogs in County Leitrim, a man giving his pony a sip of Guinness and a small boy leading cows up a road in County Kerry. Earlier in her life Freedman was a musician, and she clearly still loves music makers: the book includes several striking pictures of old men playing their pipes in solitude and many more of fiddlers and accordionists. Other standbys of Irish life--pubs, the Catholic Church, hunting--are present, but in an unobtrusive, unconventional way. A few photos (a trio of mud wrestlers; a group of college lads with their pants around their ankles) briefly take the book away from Freedman's romantic rural vision, but for the most part, she succeeds in presenting a photo-journal that lovingly captures the enduring aspects of Irish tradition. 90 duotone photos.
The Seedy Side of the Circus, Documented in Gritty Black and White
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Jill Freedman, TK (all images courtesy Higher Pictures)
Jill Freedman, “Circus Days” (1971), vintage gelatin silver print (All images courtesy Higher Pictures)
In documenting the rough corners of 1970s New York, Jill Freedman brought out with her photography something old-school lurid; like the flashbulb exposures of Weegee and Brassaï in the decades before, she always offered a startlingly and very human view on her street subjects. When in 1971 the photographer, then in her early 30s, borrowed a white Volkswagen bus to join the circus for two months, she turned her 35-mm camera on the claustrophobia of the caged animals and strange lives of the clowns and performers.
Circus Days
Two photographs by Jill Freedman from “Circus Days” (1971), vintage gelatin silver prints
Back in 1977, she published these images in a book called Circus Days, and Higher Pictures gallery in New York is now showing over 20 of the photographs for the first time in New York in an exhibition of the same name. While you might expect art about the circus to be whimsical and amusing, walking around the gallery is totally unsettling. Elephants are pushed into trucks that barely contain their bulk, clowns apply their thick makeup smiles and frowns that, if you have even a touch of coulrophobia (the popular term for the fear of clowns) will creep you out. Freedman totally immersed herself in her travels with the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus as they roamed the East Coast and pitched their striped tent in anonymous fields (no location is given for any of the photographs, the circus itself being the constant place). The personal connection she made with the people in the circus offered plenty of candid looks beyond the playful veneer of the circus into the tired faces and worn props that were resurrected each night under the big top.
Circus Days
Jill Freedman, “Circus Days” (1971), vintage gelatin silver print
Night after night, Freedman attended the circus performances, and some of her juxtapositions of the crowd with the main event are especially grim, like one in which a group of elephants are seated on chairs, likely compelled after years of harsh training, and in the foreground children also confined in wheelchairs watch. Subtlety is not the goal here, as one photograph goes in close to the chain around the elephant’s leg, and is installed next to another shot zoomed in on its surprisingly small and mournful eye surrounded by wrinkled flesh.
Circus Days
Jill Freedman, “Circus Days” (1971), vintage gelatin silver print
Circus Days
Jill Freedman, “Circus Days” (1971), vintage gelatin silver print
There’s also a built-in nostalgia, even if you’ve never attended a circus with a live lion and a tamer. Freedman wrote that:
The circus is a reminder of all those trips never taken, all those wild schemes gone cold in the sober morning. It’s a fragile fantasy, here today, gone tomorrow, free like we’re not. Free and nameless in a world full of bills and kids and credit cards that have got our numbers. The circus is an exuberant place, like childhood: a celebration of the joy of just being alive. It is a magic place, full of the mystery, terror, and ecstasy of childhood. It is grotesque and beautiful, strange and wondrous to behold. A place you feel more than you remember, where things imagined are as real as things happened…
The colors in the light filtering through the center poles, the pin and grommet holes, under the sidewalls. The sensual pleasure of a summer shower, wind and rain rapping the canvas over your head and you inside, warm and dry. Protected from the real world by a thin layer of magic. If we lose all of this, what will we have lost? And where will the free people go, when circus days, like the good old days, like the dreams you had, like the child you were, are gone.
Circus Days
Jill Freedman, “Circus Days” (1971), vintage gelatin silver print
Although she had a powerful eye in her documentary art, Freedman unfortunately dropped off the photography map in later decades due to health, finances, and personal feelings on the direction of contemporary photography. While New York is no longer like it was when in the 1970s and ’80s she photographed the camaraderie of cops taking on Alphabet City bar fights and other street violence, and firefighters battling the heat of flames and angry poverty in the south Bronx, the exhibition at Higher Pictures leaves you hoping she might someday again focus her camera to evoke the grimy, seedy side of its streets — or better yet, run away again to join the circus.
Jill Freedman: Circus Days runs at Higher Pictures (980 Madison Avenue) Upper East Side, shows through March 9, 2013.
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Vintage Photos of a Jolly 70s Circus
ByJill FreedmanandCameron Cuchulainn
Jun 18 2017, 11:00pm
Veteran photographer Jill Freedman captures the gaiety and joy of being under the big top.
Photographer Jill Freedman's work has taken her through the untamed heart of the America—from the front lines of poverty to rooftops raging with fire to life and death situations with street cops. In 1971, she found herself in the backstage of a bigtop. She published photos from her experience of traveling with the Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus in her photobook Circus Days.
When she got to know the characters behind Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers, she found a chosen family, many of them outsiders who joined up for better pastures. "It was a ticket out of town," Freedman said. In this circle, "no one had real names," with workers taking on monikers like "Little Bobby" and "Doniker Mike." Besides the people, she was moved by the wonder of the show and the personality of the animals. A lifetime animal lover, she hated their captivity, and made a number of photos that showed their power and grace. On the move with the crew over two months, she loved the fact that something was always going on—drawing all the people together and then exploiting the labor of the elephants to raise the tent, doing two shows, tearing it down, and heading out every night to the next town, with the constant elbow grease of the workers who produce the circus, called roustabouts.
While making Circus Days, Freedman used a stabilized printing process to review some of the photos, so these prints were not treated with a fixative. She eventually put them into a large stack, and they sat on a shelf, untouched for years. Because the prints were never treated, they stuck together, turning into a big brick. She forgot all about the photos, until she discovered the congealed stack of prints recently. She contemplated breaking the pile up with a power drill or asking the kids playing basketball across the street from her home to help her smash it apart. But after some careful picking and peeling, the stack finally relented.
Below you can check out these previously unreleased prints of images from Freedman's Circus Days period. The weight of these photos she came away with from that time is the poignance of a space created to strike awe, and an admiration for those who made their way pacing in front of crowds or looking for home in the company of strangers.
Jill Freedman's works are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, and George Eastman House, among others. At 77, she posts regularly to her Instagram account, and is represented by Steven Kasher Gallery, New York. In the future, Freedman intends to publish more photo books to augment the seven she has released to date, including Firehouse and Street Cops, which are featured in Cheryl Dunn's 2013 documentary on street photographers, Everybody Street.
Finding Inspiration in the
Struggle at Resurrection City
By Maurice Berger Oct. 24, 2017 Oct. 24, 2017 Comment
Devastated by the assassination of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Jill Freedman quit her copywriting job at a New York advertising agency and headed to Washington, D.C., to protest poverty and live among shacks and tents on the National Mall. Little more than an amateur photographer at the time, her commitment to racial and economic justice made her the only photographer who stayed and documented the entire six-week encampment known as Resurrection City.
Her striking photographs are on exhibit at Steven Kasher Gallery in New York and featured in a book, “Resurrection City, 1968,” published by Damiani with photographs and texts by Ms. Freedman and essays by John Edwin Mason and Aaron Bryant. These photographs document, and invite us to reconsider, one of the most controversial episodes in civil rights history.
Resurrection City was the centerpiece of the Poor People’s Campaign, organized by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and, initially, by Dr. King. The campaign departed from earlier demonstrations — which had touched on economic issues but emphasized racial discrimination — to focus on jobs, education and a fair minimum wage. Its expanded platform helped attract a wide range of participants, including poor whites, Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans and Native Americans.
Photo
Boys playing in the mud after days of rain. Washington, D.C. 1968.
Boys playing in the mud after days of rain. Washington, D.C. 1968.Credit Jill Freedman, Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery
It was initially conceived as a series of nonviolent demonstrations, marches, and meetings with government officials in Washington and other cities. But after the King assassination, and under the direction of the Rev. Ralph Abernathy, S.C.L.C.’s new president, the campaign focused on Resurrection City, a temporary settlement built of plywood and canvas near the mall’s reflecting pool.
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Construction began on May 13, 1968. Soon, several thousand people were living in a settlement that buzzed with activity. Rallies were held. Celebrities visited. Speeches were delivered. Demonstrators made daily pilgrimages to federal agencies. And Ms. Freedman photographed what she witnessed. “I knew I had to shoot the Poor People’s Campaign when they murdered Martin Luther King Jr.,” she later recalled. “I had to see what was happening, to record it and be part of it. I felt so bad.”
Gaining the trust of its residents, Ms. Freedman intimately documented life in the settlement: people congregating outside their makeshift shelters; demonstrators walking past a line of grim-faced policemen; a dapper man selling copies of Muhammad Speaks, the official newspaper of the Nation of Islam; children in rain boots frolicking in the mud; a kneeling man, his back to the camera, playing the flute; litter scattered on the marble steps of a building; and numerous portraits of residents — dignified, resolute and sometimes weary.
These photographs present a measured view of a historical event that has been more typically labeled a failure by journalists and scholars. The campaign resulted in little substantive change in federal policy. And the encampment itself was beset by problems: fragile structures endangered by intermittent rain and flooding; sanitation and health issues; petty theft; and rifts between organizers. On June 24, more than a thousand police officers cleared the encampment and evicted its remaining 500 residents.
But Ms. Freedman’s photographs affirm it was also a place of quiet defiance. These images depict solidarity among activists of all races. They reveal the dignity and courage of parents determined to provide their children with a better life. They portray a range of faces — beautiful, radiant, serious, laughing, or animated in song and protest. They remind us that, for some, the settlement provided a respite from the unremitting poverty of home. “I’m living better here than I ever did there,” was the way one resident then described it to The New York Times.
Photo
A police officer orders a protester to move from the street. Washington, D.C. 1968.
A police officer orders a protester to move from the street. Washington, D.C. 1968.Credit Jill Freedman, Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery
Ms. Freedman’s images underscore the vital role played by photography in the movement. Dr. King conceived the Poor People’s Campaign as a “new kind of Selma or Birmingham” — an event that might serve as a catalyst for change. He was keenly aware of the power of visual media, whether in print or on television, to spur change, commenting on several occasions about the authority of pictures to shift public opinion. His own popularity, and that of the movement he led, waning, Dr. King viewed the campaign as a way of reinvigorating support for the movement, given its broad platform of economic justice.
But the images of Resurrection City had the opposite effect. Seen in its time as a fiasco, the event was generally represented by images of desolation, filth and decay. Ms. Freedman’s photographs of Resurrection City are neither idealized nor derisive. Instead, they offer a compassionate and candid view of a historic event shrouded in myths and stereotypes.
“If you forget about things like traffic lights, dress shops, and cops, Resurrection City was pretty much just another city. Crowded. Hungry. Dirty. Gossipy. Beautiful,” Ms. Freedman wrote. “It was the world, squeezed between flimsy snow fences and stinking humanity. There were people there who’d give you the shirt off their backs, and others who’d kill you for yours. And every type in between. Just a city.”
Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.
Follow @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Jill Freedman is on Instagram. You can also find us on Facebook and Instagram.
How a Photographer Illuminated the Plight of the 'Invisible Poor'
John Edwin Mason
Oct 26, 2017
They came to Washington, D.C., in the spring of 1968, by the thousand — young and old, black and white, traveling in buses and cars and mule trains. Some had left homes in the rural South. Others came from cities like Memphis, Chicago and Los Angeles. Most were African Americans, but Latinos, white, and members of half a dozen Native American nations were on hand as well. Virtually all of them were poor. Although Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) had summoned them to the nation's capital, the movement belonged to them. This was the Poor People's Campaign (PPC).
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They were often called "the invisible poor." But they came to Washington determined to be seen and heard by their government and by the nation as a whole. They had answered King's call because they shared his conviction that the nation's progress toward racial equality and economic justice had stalled. Indeed, King believed that the nation was in crisis. He pointed to signs that couldn't be missed — millions of citizens of the world's richest nation living in grinding poverty; violent eruptions of rage and frustration in black inner cities; an immoral war in Southeast Asia that siphoned away resources from anti-poverty programs at home while spreading suffering and death abroad. During the December 1967 press conference at which the SCLC launched the PPC, King told reporters that America was in the grips of "a kind of social insanity."
King was convinced that a renewed campaign of civil disobedience — in his words, "a new kind of Selma or Birmingham" — would recalibrate America's moral compass and force the government to address the needs of the poor. He felt that the campaign's demands for jobs for every able-bodied worker and for a decent income for the elderly and infirm would receive "a sympathetic understanding across the nation." King pledged to "lead waves of the nation's poor and disinherited to Washington." Once there, what he called "militant nonviolent actions," such as marches and sit-ins, would "dramatize the economic plight of the Negro, and compel the government to act."
In New York City, Jill Freedman heard King's call — and she answered. Like King, she sensed that America faced an existential crisis. In a recent interview, she told me that his assassination in April 1968, only weeks before the PPC was scheduled to arrive in Washington, left her devastated and searching for a way to respond. A chance encounter with a campaign organizer in Central Park seemed to supply the answer. Still in her 20s, she quit her job as a copywriter for an advertising agency and left for the nation's capital with hundreds of others, in what she describes as a "long covered Greyhound wagon train." Her camera was in her hand. Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968, an exhibition that opens at the Steven Kasher Gallery on Thursday, and her new book, Resurrection City, 1968, showcase the photographs that she made as a participant in the PPC.
Freedman was far from being a professional photographer. At the time, she was little more than an enthusiastic amateur with a darkroom. She was in love with the art and craft of photography, however, and was especially drawn to the way the photo-essays she saw in LIFE magazine, by photographers such as of W. Eugene Smith, told stories about the quiet heroism of ordinary people. She felt that photographs like Smith's introduced viewers to people and events — and to truths — that they might never have otherwise imagined. Photography like this had the potential to change the world, at least in some small way, and Freedman wanted to play her part. By joining the PPC, she committed herself to documenting the campaign that King had called into being.
Resurrection City, the PPC's plywood and canvas city-within-a-city that took shape on the Mall in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial, became the visible symbol of the PPC. For the six weeks of its existence, in May and June 1968, it was also Freedman's home. The encampment was a magnet for photographers. Scores came and went, and some made compelling photographs. But of those photographers only Freedman lived in the city, from beginning to end, and her pictures stand out from all the others.
Most of the photographers who visited camp were looking for kind of dramatic images that readers of newspapers and magazines had come to expect from civil rights campaigns. Clichés were easy to find — daily marches to government buildings; periodic confrontations with the police; charismatic leaders, such as a young Jesse Jackson. Visits by Sidney Poitier and other celebrities, and concerts by the likes of jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, also provided photographers occasions for making photographs that instantly caught the eye.
Jill Freedman and Demonstrator, Poor Peoples Campaign, Washington, D.C., 1968.Jill Freedman and Demonstrator, Poor Peoples Campaign, Washington, D.C., 1968. Jill Freedman, courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery
Freedman sometimes photographed scenes like these. It was important, after all, to document the protests and the police. But those aren't the photographs at the heart of either the exhibition or the book. Avoiding most of the easy drama and all of the celebrities, she offers instead portraits of ordinary people — the women, men and children who were the unheralded heroes of the movement. Freedman's people are the ones with the muddiest shoes and wettest clothes, the people with the most to gain and most to lose. Her refusal to concentrate on protests and charismatic leaders challenges her viewers. She asks her audience to see the dignity and humanity amid the grime, the anger, and the rain.
Freedman's photographs of Resurrection City first appeared in the June 28, 1968, issue of LIFE as part of a photo-essay on the PPC. The photographs, five by Freedman and seven by members of the magazine's staff, focused on the daily lives of the camp's residents — children play, teenagers flirt, an elderly woman plays a guitar, everyone struggles through the mud. An article by staff writer John Neary that accompanied the photo-essay contained some of the most insightful reporting on Resurrection City to appear anywhere. He knew that the women and men who made up the PPC simply wanted their share of the American dream — "dignity, a future, a chance for their kids, a modicum of happiness." He understood knew that the campaigners were in Washington to assert their rights, not to plead for them. They had come to the capital and built their city in order to "demand an end to poverty and violence, to demand a meaningful job for every employable person, and end to hunger and malnutrition that scarred their lives." Neary admitted that he didn't know what would become of the people of Resurrection City and their campaign, but he was sure that they intended "never to be invisible again."
It is now nearly half a century since Freedman made her photographs of the PPC. That may not be forever, but it's long enough to suggest that her images of the no-longer-invisible poor have become an indelible part of the nation's historical record.
Steven Kasher Gallery
John Edwin Mason teaches African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia. He is writing a book on the photographer, writer, and filmmaker Gordon Parks. This piece is adapted from "Seeing Resurrection City, Seeing the Poor," Mason’s introduction to Freedman's new book, Resurrection City, 1968.
Dramatic Photos of the 1968 Poor People's Campaign in DC
ByCameron CuchulainnandJill Freedman
Oct 30 2017, 12:05pm
Return to Resurrection City with Jill Freedman's stunning documentation of a six-week protest on the National Mall.
Currently on view at the Steven Kasher Gallery, Jill Freedman's documentation of the Poor People's Campaign gets revisited with an ongoing exhibition and the re-release of her first photobook. Originally published under a slightly different name 47 years ago, Resurrection City, 1968 documents a movement called forth by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., just weeks before his assassination. Today it serves as a visual record of life in a protest camp that was constructed on the National Mall in Washington, DC, to demand reforms combating poverty in the United States.
In a March 18, 1968, speech to striking sanitation workers in Memphis, King asked, "What does it profit a man to be able to eat at an integrated lunch counter if he doesn't have enough money to buy a hamburger?" He and other organizers rallied for a group of around 3,000 people to travel to the National Mall and bring their concerns over inequity, lack of opportunity, and insufficient wages to the White House's doorstep. Freedman, who at the time was working as a copywriter for the advertising firm Doyle Dane Bernbach, witnessed a man dressed in a straw hat and overalls giving a speech to a gathering crowd. This was Civil Rights activist and musician Jimmy Collier. Freedman recalled, "He was in Central Park one day with a mule talking about the Poor People's Campaign. 'Will you join us, come with us to Washington?' I said, 'Fuck yeah!'" She quit her job with the words, "Tell them I'm a photographer."
Self-taught and a novice, Freedman simply joined the demonstrators on one of the buses from New York City and began photographing. Speaking with her now, she relates that although she was untrained, she had been deeply affected by seeing photographs of the Holocaust as a child. As a young woman, she felt a sense of purpose when she first picked up a camera. Hoping to take photos that would transmit the sense of injustice she felt when she saw police beating protesters demonstrating against the Vietnam War, she snapped her way to DC with the intention to make images that would articulate both the campaign's reform goals and capture the history of this part of the civil rights movement. When she arrived, encampments set up around the National Mall formed the main hub of the protest. It was called Resurrection City, and for the next six weeks, Freedman lived in and photographed the ad hoc camp.
What distinguished her documentation was that, unlike the many photographers who covered the event on assignment, the demonstrator and self-assigned historian embedded herself for the duration of the camp's existence. Freedman remembers meeting writer John Neary and a photographer from LIFE while in line for the Campaign's food tent: "He said, 'How long have you been here?' I said, 'Well, I just came, and shot on the way down.' I had gotten contact sheets of [my photographs]... He looked at the pictures and said, 'Aw, can I have your film [and] take it back? At the very least, they can develop it and contact it for you.' He had to talk me into it—I said, 'No, no, they might scratch the negatives.' LIFE magazine!" But after Neary convinced Freedman to let him take her images back to New York City, LIFE included six of her photos in "A New Resolve: Never to Be Invisible Again," Neary's piece on the origins and events of the Poor People's Campaign. Getting published in what was essentially the front page of American media gave her the chops to soldier on as a photographer. Years later, with six weeks' worth of photos that documented the events of the Campaign, and support from publisher Richard Grossman as well as her idol, W. Eugene Smith, Freedman released a full survey as her first book, Old News: Resurrection City.
Resurrection City, 1968, this month's re-release of the book, features two introductory essays by authors that study photography as it relates to the history of protest movements. The first is by John Edwin Mason, an associate professor at the University of Virginia's Corcoran Department of History. The second is by Aaron Bryant, curator of Photography, Visual Culture, and Contemporary Political History at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Although the Poor People's Campaign would end in tragedy, it made small policy gains toward fighting poverty and in visibility for the American poor. Authorities ended up shutting the camp down, gassing the demonstrators as they sang freedom songs in the shadow of Robert F. Kennedy's assassination. In recent news, however, political leader Reverend William Barber II has announced that he is spearheading a new Poor People's Campaign to take place in 2018. Whatever it may bring, the original campaign lives on in Freedman's evocative images: the camaraderie and idealism of activism, the ways in which people worked together, the stark artistry of their political statements, and the interactions with the policemen who would eventually bring an end to the demonstrations. All of this, and more, was captured by Freedman's camera, and her pictures continue to serve as a record of the historic event. Both in the book and at her ongoing show, Freedman accomplished what she wished for when she first got on a bus headed toward the Capitol.
Jill Freedman: Resurrection City is on view at Steven Kasher Gallery at 515 West 26th Street in New York until 12/22/17. Freedman's works are included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the International Center of Photography, and the George Eastman Museum, among others. With photographic interests in both social science and humanism found in the streets, she makes regular posts to her Instagram account @jillfreedmanphoto and is represented by Steven Kasher Gallery, New York. In the future, Freedman intends to publish more photo books to augment the seven she has released to date, including Firehouse and Street Cops, which are featured in Cheryl Dunn 's 2013 documentary on street photographers, Everybody Street.
UPDATE 10/31/17: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated that the opening of Resurrection City, 1968 was this week. The show opened on 10/26/17 and will be on view through 12/22/17.
Tagged:PhotosCivil Rights Movementjill freedmanphotobooksPoor People's Campaign
March 13, 2018
Jill Freedman on the Poor People’s Campaign
Resurrection City, Washington D.C., 1968, Vintage gelatin silver print, printed ca. 1968 10h x 8w in JF229, Signed by artist verso © Jill Freedman/Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York
Jill Freedman was a young advertising copywriter with a serious interest in photography when, in 1968, she quit her job to join the Poor People’s Campaign. Before his assassination, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had launched the Campaign to address American poverty and had asked poor people of all races and ethnicities, from all over the United States, to descend on Washington D.C. to demand that elected leaders support better jobs and opportunities. In April 1968, just weeks before the action was to begin, King was assassinated. Freedman’s grief drove her to join and document the PPC in Washington, as historian John Edwin Mason notes in his essay in Resurrection City, 1968, the new book of Freedman’s images from that period.
For seven weeks that spring, thousands of Americans lived in makeshift shacks on the Washington Mall in what became known as Resurrection City. Freedman was there the whole time, as participant and unofficial photographer. Mason points out that Freedman’s photographs “stand out from those of all the others” who photographed the encampment and protests because she stayed for the duration and built relationships that allowed her to show regular folks and real life, not just the leaders or the expected pictures captured by news photographers who spent hours, not days and weeks, in Resurrection City.
Her images and texts are frank and unromantic—“There were people there who’d give you the shirt off their backs, and others who’d kill you for yours. And every type in between,” she writes—but they show heroism and pride and defiance.
In another of the book’s essays, Aaron Bryant, photography curator of the National Museum of African American History, points out that Freedman “privileges a ‘Womanist’ point of view as a recurring theme throughout her series of images.” By documenting women’s leadership, she brings an important perspective to the history of the campaign. In one image, for instance, a woman burns a draft card, risking a hefty fine and imprisonment.
Freedman published her first book of this work in 1971. This new edition marks the 50th anniversary of the PPC. It finds American society cosmetically altered, but fundamentally similar. As Freedman notes in her foreword, “Always have been poor people, still are, always will be. Because governments are run by ambitious men of no imagination. Whose priorities are so twisted that they burn food while people starve. And we let them. So that history doesn’t change much but the names.”
—Conor Risch
Resurrection City, 1968
By Jill Freedman
Essays by John Edwin Mason, Aaron Bryant
Damiani
176 pages, 141 b&w images
$45
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Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968 @Steven Kasher
By Anne Doran / In Galleries / November 10, 2017
JTF (just the facts): A total of 73 black-and-white photographs, framed in black and matted, hung on the white walls of the gallery’s two rooms. All of the works are vintage gelatin-silver prints made in 1968, the year the pictures were taken. The images have largely been printed in one of two sizes: 11×14 (or reverse) or 8×10 (or reverse); there are 52 of the large size and 16 of the small size in the show. In addition, there are four odd-sized prints measuring 8 7/8 x 13 5/8 inches, 14 x 10 inches, 8 7/8 x 11 3/4 inches, and 14 x 10 1/4 inches, respectively. In 1971 Freedman published Old News: Resurrection City. (Grossman, 1971). This exhibition coincides with the release of a new book, Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968, published by Damiani (here), which features most of the 185 photographs from Freedman’s original book. It is available at the gallery for $45. (Installation shots below.)
Comments/Context: In the spring of 1968, Jill Freedman, a gumptious and prodigiously talented young street photographer, quit her day job as a copywriter in New York City to join the Poor People’s March on Washington. Organized by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a non-violent call for economic justice, and carried out after Dr. King’s assassination by Ralph Abernathy, the Poor People’s Campaign brought over 3000 protestors, of all ethnicities and from all 50 states, to the Washington Mall, where they built a plywood encampment they called Resurrection City.
Freedman lived in Resurrection City for the entire six weeks of its existence, photographing the daily life of its residents as they rallied, made speeches, protested in front of government buildings, confronted police, built makeshift kitchens, organized clothing swaps, and dealt with flooding, petty crime, and illness. Freedman, one of the most important (and one of the few women) postwar documentary photographers, captured it all, with an artist’s eye and a passionate interest in the individuals she depicted.
In 2008, some 30 of the resulting photographs were exhibited at Higher Pictures gallery in New York. The current show comprises about twice as many pictures. They reveal Freedman to be a natural storyteller, with a feeling for character and situation and a special interest in families.
A group of young men escorts an old woman carrying a homemade sign past a line of cops holding batons. Three boys float past flooded tents on a homemade raft. A dignified older woman wears a button reading “Welfare rights now!” She’s no anonymous demonstrator—Freedman carefully records her name, Addla Thompson, as she frequently does in photographs of other people, among them the Reverend James Orange, Chicken, Bennie King, Bea, and Madam. A black suited man hands out copies of Muhammad Speaks, the newspaper of the Black Panthers; a group of toughs, simply labeled “The Invaders from Memphis,” might be looking for trouble, or just for a better life.
There are none of Cartier-Bresson’s decisive moments here—Freedman records a place and time of energy, chaos, and multiple agendas. “Resurrection City was pretty much just another city. Crowded. Hungry. Dirty. Gossipy. Beautiful,” Freedman wrote in a 1971 text, some of which is excerpted in the show. “It was the world, squeezed between flimsy snow fences and stinking humanity. There were people there who’d give you the shirt off their backs, and others who’d kill you for yours. And every type in between. Just a city.”
Nor is space fractured, as in the photographs of Lee Friedlander, or sculpted as in the work of William Eggleston. Rather, it is architectonic. In addition to recording a variety of do-it-yourself dwellings—cobbled-together, scrap-wood and canvas dwellings sporting spray-painted messages or designations like “SOCK IT TO ME BLACK POWER!”; “We Shall Overcome”; and “000 Poor Avenue”—Freedman frequently depicts protestors made small by downtown Washington’s inhumanly scaled greenways, avenues, and government buildings. A dozen or so demonstrators sit on the steps of a building facing a seemingly endless, tree-lined, gravel walkway. One of them wears a sweatshirt emblazoned, heartbreakingly, with the phrase “How can we lose when we’re so sincere?” The grand vista in front of them is the silent answer.
Nevertheless, Freedman never represents her subjects as victims, instead contrasting Washington politicians’ indifference with the marcher’s quiet determination to be seen. A barefoot woman sits on the bottom of the Capitol steps, which rise endlessly behind her like an unscalable mountain. Nevertheless, she sits foursquare, truculent, and immovable, her sagging skirt reflecting in reverse the Capitol dome. Elsewhere, the Washington Monument looms over a line of shanties, one complete with a small, white, picket fence that somehow shames the phallic symbol behind it.
On June 24, 1968, a special Civil Disturbance Squad moved in to clear the encampment, where the remaining residents sang and clapped until being forced out or arrested. Like Occupy Wall Street, Resurrection City is mostly remembered as a failure, marked by filth and disorganization and, in the end, having little effect on Federal policy.
But although such street protests all too often lacked an organization capable of following up over the long term, civil rights leaders, including Martin Luther King Jr., understood the power of the photograph to educate and motivate. As futile as it may seem in retrospect, the People’s March, living on in Freedman’s photographs, resonates at a time when, according to a Pew Report of 2013, income inequality is at its highest since 1928, and when a looming Republican tax bill threatens to make things much, much worse. As Michael McBride, Traci Blackmon, Frank Reid, and Barbara Williams Skinner recently wrote in the New York Times, “Rather than critique from afar, come out of your homes, follow those who are closest to the pain, and help us to redeem this country, and yourselves, in the process.” And that’s just what Freedman did.
Collector’s POV: Vintage prints of all 185 images included in exhibition catalog—about half of which are view here, are available as a set, price upon request. Duplicate vintage prints for some of the images are available for $6000 for the 11 x 14 prints and $5000 each for the 8 x 10 prints. Freedman’s work is not widely available in the secondary markets, so gallery retail is likely the best option for interested collectors at this point.
Read more about: Jill Freedman, Steven Kasher Gallery, Damiani Editore
Capturing the Poor People's Campaign
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Transcript
June 21, 200812:01 AM ET
Heard on Weekend Edition Saturday
Bilal Qureshi
Jill Freedman, who quit her job to join the Poor People's Campaign, recalls what she saw with her camera.
Documenting Resurrection City
Photographer Jill Freedman.
Bilal Qureshi, NPR
Photographer Jill Freedman learned of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination while sitting in a fish and chip shop near her apartment in New York's West Village. She was so shocked and angered by his death, she quit her job and joined King's final act of protest: the 1968 Poor People's Campaign.
King and other civil rights leaders had intended the demonstration to be a weeklong march through Washington, D.C., to urge Congress to pass anti-poverty legislation to help the poor find work, health care and housing.
Protesters began with a march on May 12, 1968, and ultimately endured weeks of rain and mud living in makeshift shacks and tents on the National Mall. Before his assassination, King had expanded his civil rights platform to include economic equality. Freedman says the Poor People's Campaign was to show the nation "here's poor people — black, white, Indian. You can't ignore us. You can't read your paper past us on the train. Here we are."
Freedman spent her days photographing those who demonstrated and lived in the encampment, known as Resurrection City. The powerful images she created became the basis of her first book, Old News: Resurrection City, which was published in 1970. As she reflects on the experience today, she says she recognizes the movement's naivete and idealism.
Yet, she says, her days living in Resurrection City taught her that "it's important to stand up, win or lose. It's important to be counted."
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Fifty Years Later, Remembering Resurrection City and the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968
Lenneal Henderson and thousands of other protesters occupied the National Mall for 42 days during the landmark civil rights protest
Civil rights leader Rev. Ralph Abernathy
Civil rights leader Rev. Ralph Abernathy, in short sleeves, leads the Poor People’s March to the edge of the grounds of the U.S. Capitol building in Washington, June 24, 1968. Abernathy and his followers from Resurrection City marched to the Agriculture Department and then to the Capitol. (AP Photo)
By Anna Diamond
Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe
May 2018
One day in early December 1967, Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. laid out his vision for the Poor People’s Campaign, his next protest in Washington, D.C.,: “This will be no mere one-day march in Washington, but a trek to the nation’s capital by suffering and outraged citizens who will go to stay until some definite and positive active is taken to provide jobs and income for the poor.”
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Three years earlier, when President Lyndon Johnson declared his war on poverty, 19 percent of Americans—an estimated 35 million—lived below the poverty level. Seeing how poverty cut across race and geography, King called for representatives of American Indian, Mexican-American, Appalachian populations and other supporters to join him on the National Mall in May 1968. He sought a coalition for the Poor People’s Campaign that would “demand federal funding for full employment, a guaranteed annual income, anti-poverty programs, and housing for the poor.”
Assassinated in Memphis on April 4, King never made it to the Mall, but thousands traveled to Washington to honor King’s memory and to pursue his vision. They built “Resurrection City,” made up of 3,000 wooden tents, and camped out there for 42 days, until evicted on June 24, a day after their permit expired.
But the goals of the Campaign were never realized and today, 43 million Americans are estimated to live in poverty. Earlier this year, several pastors started a revival the Poor People’s Campaign with the support of organized labor, focusing on raising the minimum wage.
On the 50th anniversary of King’s assassination and the 50th anniversary of the Campaign, Smithsonian.com spoke with one of the activists who traveled to Resurrection City: Lenneal Henderson, who was then a college student at University of California, Berkeley.
How did you end up at Resurrection City?
In 1967, when I was an undergraduate student at UC Berkeley, MLK came to campus and met with our Afro-American Student Union, of which I was part. He told us about this idea he had of organizing a campaign to focus on poverty and employment generation. One of my professors actually got some money to send 34 of us by Greyhound bus to Washington, D.C., to participate in the campaign.
Why did you feel compelled to go?
I was raised in the housing projects of New Orleans and San Francisco, and my parents were very strong community advocates. I also witnessed the Black Panther Party emerge in Oakland in 1966. Stokely Carmichael’s call for Black Power focused on the need to transform our communities first in order to get ourselves out of poverty.
What was the journey to D.C. like?
I took a Greyhound bus from San Francisco. But I diverted to New Orleans to see my relatives. I was there when King was assassinated and the very next day, I got back on the Greyhound bus and headed to Washington. From the perimeter of the town, I could see the flames and the smoke of the city going up and the rioting that was taking place. It was pretty sobering. I stayed with a family in D.C. until the Resurrection City was ready to move into.
How did you pass your days in Resurrection City?
Life in the camp was kind of frenzied; it was very, very busy. There were things going on every day, there were people going back and forth, not only organized demonstrations, but to meet with agencies like the Department of Agriculture, Labor and [Housing and Urban Development]. I went to about seven or eight different agency meetings.
I went to some meetings of the D.C. government, and I also went to meetings of D.C.-based organizations that were part of the coalition of the Poor People’s Campaign like the United Planning Organization and the Washington branch of The National Urban League. At the camp, we also had something called The University, which was a sort of spontaneous, makeshift higher education clearing house that we put together at the camp for students who were coming from different colleges and universities both, from HBCUs and majority universities.
Lenneal Henderson
Lenneal Henderson (Eli Meir Kaplan)
What was life like inside the camp?
I was there all 42 days, and it rained 29 of them. It got to be a muddy mess after a while. And with such basic accommodations, tensions are inevitable. Sometimes there were fights and conflicts between and among people. But it was an incredible experience, almost indescribable. While we were all in a kind of depressed state about the assassinations of King and RFK, we were trying to keep our spirits up, and keep focused on King’s ideals of humanitarian issues, the elimination of poverty and freedom. It was exciting to be part of something that potentially, at least, could make a difference in the lives of so many people who were in poverty around the country.
What was the most memorable thing you witnessed?
I saw Jesse Jackson, who was then about 26 years old, with these rambunctious, young African-American men, who wanted to exact some vengeance for the assassination of King. Jackson sat them down and said, “This is just not the way, brothers. It’s just not the way.” The he went further and said, “Look, you’ve got to pledge to me and to yourself that when you go back to wherever you live, before the year is out you’re going to do two things to make a difference in your neighborhood.” It was an impressive moment of leadership.
What was it like when the camp was forced to close?
The closing was sort of unceremonious. When the demonstrators’ permit expired on June 23, some [members of the House of] Representatives, mostly white Southerners, called for immediate removal. So the next day, about 1,000 police officers arrived to clear the camp up of its last few residents. Ultimately, they arrested 288 people, including [civil rights leader and minister Ralph] Abernathy.
What did the Poor People’s Campaign represent to you?
It represented an effort to bring together poor people from different backgrounds and different experiences, who really had not been brought together before. In fact, they’d been set against one another. People from all kinds of backgrounds, and all over the country came together: Appalachian whites, poor blacks, to mule train from Mississippi, American Indians, labor leaders, farm workers from the West, Quakers. It was just an incredible coalition in the making.
Even though the Economic Bill of Rights we were pressing for was never passed, I think it was successful in many ways. For one, the relationships that those folks built with one another carried on way beyond 1968.
How did the experience impact you?
When I went back to Berkeley to finish my degree, I went back with a certain resolve. And the year after, 1969, I went to work as an intern for California State Senator Mervyn Dymally, who had been also at the Poor People’s Campaign. Now, I’m co-teaching a course on the Campaign at the University of Baltimore with a friend of mine. He was also there but we didn’t know each other at that time. We kept that resolve going, and kept in touch with the movement ever since.
Resurrection City is also the subject of an exhibition currently on display at NMAH, curated by NMAAHC’s Aaron Bryant. More information available here.
Resurrection City--tearing down of wood huts
Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968
THE METROPOLITANFebruary 8, 2018
2018Book
Published in 1970, Jill Freedman’s Old News: Resurrection City documents the culmination of the Poor People’s Campaign of 1968, organized by Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and carried out under the leadership of Ralph Abernathy in the wake of Dr King’s assassination. Three thousand people set up camp for six weeks in a makeshift town that was dubbed Resurrection City, and participated in daily protests. Freedman lived in the encampment for its entire six weeks, photographing the residents, their daily lives, their protests and their eventual eviction.
50 years later, this new edition of the book reprints most of the 185 pictures from the original publication, with improved printing and a more vivid design. Alongside Freedman’s hard-hitting original text, two introductory essays are included, by John Edwin Mason, historian of African history and the history of photography at the University of Virginia, and by Aaron Bryant, Curator of Photography, Visual Culture, and Contemporary Political History at the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
The photographs of Jill Freedman (born 1939) are held in the permanent collections of major art institutions including The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the International Center of Photography, New York; the New York Public Library; the Jewish Museum, New York; the George Eastman House, Rochester; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington DC; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
The Incendiary Photography of Jill Freedman
Irreverent and incisive photographs of a 1968 camp on the National Mall evoke the power of protest.
By Roslyn Bernstein
Jill Freedman and Demonstrator, Poor People's campaign, Washington, D.C., 1968. Jill Freedman, Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery.
When she was twenty-six years old, Jill Freedman saw policemen knocking down Vietnam War protesters in New York City. Passionately anti-war, she asked a friend for a camera and began photographing their confrontations. She had never used a camera before, but everything clicked into place. “I knew that I had found my thing,” she said. “It’s like music, the rhythm of it. Photography was just natural to me.”
A Pittsburgh native, Freedman grew up in the heavily Jewish Squirrel Hill neighborhood. She still has fond memories of Mrs. Weinstein’s Deli, famous for its latkes and blintzes. She majored in sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, but spent her junior and senior years singing in a jazz group that played in steelworker bars. “You could do what you wanted,” she said. “Nobody was listening.” After graduation, she headed to Israel by ocean liner, spending 1961 and ‘62 in an apartment above the famous Bezalel Art School and singing in local clubs. These were modest performances, she said, adding that she “played the seven chords that I knew on the guitar.”
Freedman was deeply affected by accounts of the Holocaust. Although her parents did not want to talk about it, she found old issues of Life Magazine in the attic with photo essays on the subject. It was in these magazines that Freedman discovered the work of W. Eugene Smith, whose images focused on regular people who lived regular lives.
After two years in London, Freedman settled in New York City where she landed a job as a copy writer at the prestigious advertising firm of Doyle, Dane, and Birnbach. The pay was good and the office was fun. But everything changed on April 4, 1968, when she learned that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. had been assassinated.
“I was very upset about King’s death,” she said. “I saw a guy in overalls, a recruiter, standing in Central Park. He was trying to get people to join the Poor People’s Campaign. I was angry. Why, I kept asking myself, do the good people always seem to get it.” So she joined the Campaign. “Whatever was going on, I was not going to miss it.”
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Protesters clapping and chanting next to baton carrying police on the day the Civil Disturbance Squad shut down Resurrection City, Poor People's Campaign, Washington D.C., 1968, June 24, 1968. Jill Freedman, Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery.
Thus began Freedman’s journey on the Greyhound bus caravan to Resurrection City, the name of an encampment on the National Mall that was at the center of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s attempt to tackle economic and social injustice.
Freedman was one of several thousand people—blacks, whites, Puerto Ricans, and Native Americans—from nearly all fifty states who settled in the wooden and canvas shanties they planted in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial. Over the camp’s six week lifespan from May 13th to June 24th, 1968, Freedman tramped around in the muck, fought off mosquitoes, and photographed occupants’ daily lives. “This was the first story that I ever shot or wrote,” she said. “I wanted to get everything and people welcomed me because I, too, was living in the mud.”
Freedman certainly did shoot everything: A proud African American woman, her hands clasping her umbrella, barefoot on the steps of the Capitol; a grandfather holding his two grandchildren in diapers; a girl smiling at the camera, standing in front of a shanty with the words “NOTHING BUT SOUL” printed in large letters; a woman watching TV inside a shanty; an old woman in mud-covered boots taking a rest inside a shack; kids playing on a tire swing next to a shack; protestors clapping and chanting next to baton-carrying police on the day the Civil Disturbance Squad shut down the encampment; a demonstrator playing the flute by the Reflecting Pool. We see a young Freedman, too, her Nikon around her neck, arms crossed, and standing next to John Mosely, a demonstrator who brought his wife and large family to live in Resurrection City.
A foreword that Freedman wrote in 1970 for Old News: Resurrection City, 1968, still rings true in the recently published 2017 book, released to accompany the first exhibit of these photographs, Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968, on view at the Steven Kasher Gallery until December 22nd.
Of course, it was old stuff from the start. Another nonviolent demonstration. Another march on Washington. Another army camping, calling on a government that acts like the telephone company. Even poverty is ancient history. Always have been poor people, still are, always will be. Because governments are run by ambitious men of no imagination. Whose priorities are so twisted that they burn food while people starve. And we let them. So that history doesn’t change much but the names. Nothing protects the innocent. And no news is new.
“Those words are so true today,” Freedman said, launching into an anti-Trump tirade. “There’s no such thing as progress. If anything, in civil rights we evolve, we devolve. Trump is very dangerous. He has no idea what nuclear is. He will get us all incinerated.” Freedman would never vote Republican, but she is mad at the Democrats, too, “because of what the DNC did to Bernie Sanders,” her chosen candidate.
Things were different in 1968. “We believed that the PPC would make a difference,” she said. “The people in Resurrection City were some of the best folks I ever met in my life. Black, White, Hispanic, Indian. Look at my pictures. This was about being human.”
Soul City, the New York contingent of shacks in Resurrection City, Poor People’s Campaign, Washington, D.C., 1968. Jill Freedman, Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery.
Gallery director Steven Kasher describes Freedman’s photos as a kind of family album. As an expert on the Civil Rights movement himself (he has curated nearly forty shows on Civil Rights and the counter culture of 1960s over the past twenty-five years), Kasher has seen all of the archive. “Jill’s images stand out because she was embedded with the protest,” he said. “Jill is the kind of person who bonds immediately. She’s incendiary. She has a kind of fiery response and identification with people.”
Kasher dubs Freedman a latter-day Weegee. Why? “Because Weegee was radical. He treated everyone equally in a radical way. If you were a bum on the street or the governor of New York, you got the same treatment: skeptical, satirical, with a comedic sense. Freedman is like that, too. It’s her character. Everyone is treated with the same humor, sensitivity, admiration and empathetic response. Except some of the cops in Resurrection City, who were the bad guys.”
Complementing Freedman’s bold photographs is her lean, poetic text. Not an extra word. She said that she does not like to write, and confessed that she often “writhed on the floor” struggling to get the right word. She despises purple prose and admits that “every time she gets rid of an adjective or adverb,” she is happy.
If you forget about things like traffic lights and dress shops and cops, Resurrection City was pretty much just another city. Crowded. Hungry. Dirty. Gossipy. Beautiful. It was the world, squeezed between flimsy snow fences and stinking humanity. There were people there who’d give you the shirt off their backs, and others who’d kill you for yours. And every type of in between. Just a city.
Her words are unflinching. Freedman digs deep into the human psyche, acknowledging the good, the bad, and the in-between: a line of cops, nightsticks in position facing a row of demonstrators, who are holding hands; a striking shot of a policeman’s back, his fingers curled around his nightstick, as he confronts a group of demonstrators, their heads held high, their faces resolute, some even with defiant smiles. Good and evil, right and wrong, with life in the mud nearby continuing as ever—people dancing, and children playing.
Two teenage girls with a magazine sit on the porch of a shack, Resurrection City, Poor People’s Campaign, Washington, D.C., 1968. Jill Freedman, Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery.
Freedman’s description of her final night in Resurrection City, June 23, 1968, when the cops moved in and tear-gassed the demonstrators, is haunting. She was babysitting Cato, the seven-year-old son of a friend, when someone saw the cops. “Weird plastic faces, yards away,” Freedman writes, “filing stealthily along the fence. Hundreds of them. Thousands. Why? What do they want? At this hour? So many of them? What are those big guns? And a flash of fear runs, silent as cops, up my spine and over my scalp.”
Freedman describes how Cato insists upon finding his kitten before fleeing. She comforts the child by telling him that “they’re not shooting bullets, just gas,” and that the cops “don’t want to hurt us. They just want to scare us.” As they run from the gas, not sure of which direction to go in, her eyes begin to sting and her throat to feel sandy. “We are trapped like rats, the bombs bursting in air, we wait our turn, this being a democracy,” she writes.
The night ends with Cato referring to the cops as “The dirty bastids.” The demonstrators, as Freedman describes them, were “a rag-tag crowd that didn’t have time to dress for the party… People testifying. People clapping. Black Powa, Black Powa. Freedom now. All together: Now.”
Powerful, poignant, poetic.
I understand that they had to attack the people of Resurrection City, because they were afraid. Afraid of the strength that has withstood the endless rain; the stinking mud, the mosquitoes; the cold, the wet; the bad food; the respiratory epidemic, born of the elements nursed by the gas.” Although the cops have “shot enough to knock out half of Washington, DC, and a little bit of Virginia, too,” ultimately, they have failed. “How do you gas a song?” Freedman asks. “You can, unfortunately, kill a man, but how do you kill his dreams. When the dreamers hoarse and red-eyed, righteous and inevitable, sing louder than before. And breathing this music, overcome by love, I get a funny feeling that this is the last time. The last time for something we have known and grown comfortable with. But only the start of something we have yet to feel, much less understand.
Most press accounts of Resurrection City, then and now, describe it as a failure, a protest that had little effect on changing federal economic and social policy. But Jill Freedman’s photographs remain as a tribute to its historical importance, an intimate documentary of life on the National Mall in 1968.
Freedman and Kasher are currently working on a future project that Freedman calls Madhattan, editing largely unpublished photos of parties, events, and street scenes from 1970s and 1980s. So far, they have come up with over three hundred images. Recently, despite her conviction that social media is largely garbage and chatter, Freedman has begun to embrace the Internet, putting up pictures on Instagram and Facebook.
Kasher admits that Freedman’s work is often scruffy and dirty and maybe “too wacky and wild for the world,” but he is convinced of its quality. “She should be in a museum,” he said.
Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968 is on view at Steven Kasher Gallery, 515 West 26th St, New York, NY, through December 22
Roslyn Bernstein
Roslyn Bernstein is a professor emerita of journalism and creative writing at Baruch College of the City University of New York (CUNY). She is the founding director of the Sidney Harman Writer-in-Residence Program at Baruch College. She is the co-author with the architect Shael Shapiro of Illegal Living: 80 Wooster Street and the Evolution of SoHo, published by the Jonas Mekas Foundation. Her book, Boardwalk Stories, is a collection of 14 linked tales set in the years 1950 to 1970. She is currently working on a novel set in Jerusalem in 1961 during the Adolf Eichmann trial. Bernstein has reported on arts and culture from around the globe for such print publications as the New York Times, Newsday, the Village Voice, New York Magazine, Parents, Artnews, and the Columbia Journalism Review, and for such online publications as Tablet, Artslant, Tikkun, Huffington Post, and Guernica.