Jill Freedman

Jill Freedman was 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 appeared in solo and group exhibitions throughout the world, and contributed to many prominent publications.

Freedman was best known for her street and documentary photography, recalling the work of André Kertész, W. Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. She published seven books in her lifetime: Old News: Resurrection City; Circus Days; Firehouse; Street Cops; A Time That Was: Irish Moments; Jill’s Dogs; and Ireland Ever. Freedman lived and worked on the Upper West Side of New York City for most of her life. She was a hard-working, hard-living photographer who immersed herself for months at a time in the lives of street cops, firefighters, circus performers and other communities she felt were misunderstood. When it came to her work in the United States, she specialised in finding people on the rough margins of American life, rendering them as noble but not necessarily heroic. Even when her subjects were quirky or odd, Freedman never traded in oddity for its own sake; viewers might laugh with the characters, but not at them.

Freedman travelled to many parts of the world, but no place was dearer to her than Ireland. She was so taken by the country that she published two books of photographs made in Ireland and even took a loan from her photographer friend Aaron Siskind, to travel to the country when she was struggling financially in the early part of her career.

While she is often remembered a s a photographer who lingered on the margins, she very much immersed herself in the lives of those she met in Ireland and in issues that were extremely important to her such as race politics in the U.S. and the effects of poverty on communities around the world.