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| photo by Jill Freedman |
| Click photo above to view gallery. |
I was the kind of kid who always dreamed of being kidnapped by Gypsies,” says Jill Freedman. “Unhappily, I never met any Gypsies until I was an adult, and by then I was too old for them, or they were too old for me.”
Instead of leading the Gypsy life, Freedman did the next best thing and became a photographer. Actually, she had other dreams while growing up. At age 10 she wanted to become the heroine of a Jack London tale. At 12 she decided to run away from home, a project that lasted only two days. At 18, with $100 in her pocket, she boarded a freight ship bound for Israel. After two weeks there, and with no money left, she began hitchhiking around the country, sleeping at night in the desert.
She returned to the United States, which at the time was being torn apart by racial divisions and the Vietnam War. Freedman became an antiwar activist but grew frustrated. Instead of protesting, she decided to take pictures. “The first time I saw one of my contact sheets, it was like a miracle,” she says. “I was saved—photography was what I had been looking for my whole life. I was convinced that I could be a good photographer.”
Freedman photographed circuses, cops, firefighters. (Indeed, she was granted special access to the New York City Fire Department in the 1970s—one of the few photographers to be granted that privilege.) Her pioneering photography was gritty, real, and always full of passionate intimacy. “She was someone who lived with very high highs and very low lows,” recalls Naudet. “That always came through in her photographs and made them impossible not to look at. I would encourage any young photographer to study her work, to see how to bring realism into their pictures.”
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