Discover Top Posts Tagged with #jillfreedman

“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.” Jill Freedman, Photographer

#jillfreedman

my time with jill

The end of my adolescence was spent in solitude. It was not a voluntary way of being, at least not in the beginning. But eventually I began to identify with it and several self-imposed solitary practices were born out of an inability to find peace within the stillness. One of which was my habit of visiting estate sales that evolved into something of a ritual in its entirety: each weekend, I would prepare to drive to a new location, enter a home, and begin a new acquaintanceship. The moment I walked into these homes a profound heaviness fell upon me like a thick blanket, immobilizing me until I could begin to absorb that which I was experiencing.

Gaining access to what was once one’s home, filled with the remnants of their lives, were some of the most intimate moments I had ever experienced at that point in my life. I felt I had become an accidental voyeur, walking into bedrooms and discovering elegantly strewn slippers next to the bed and perfectly crooked toothbrushes still poking out of their holders in the bathroom. Kitchen table conversations would echo in my mind with voices I had never heard before as I observed the magnetized kitsch on the fridge and chipped paint on the chairs. Sometimes, an electrifying energy would snake up my spine and burn through my muscles. This was beyond superstition. It was especially powerful on the occasions that I bumped into decaying family photographs with their eternally forced smiles and coiffed hairdos and unblinking eyes gazing back at me as if to say what are you doing here?

Roland Barthes wrote about the punctum of a photograph: a particular detail, different for every onlooker, that pierces or punctures or wounds them in an inexplicable way. It’s never quite the same for any two viewers; it is an interpretation from one’s own visceral experience. I wonder if he would have been overcome with the same grief that washed over me every time I placed these images back into their closets and parted ways with the lives I had intersected with for just a moment until they prepared for the next.

I was well seasoned with this practice when I got a phone call from an old teacher asking if I’d be interested in helping a local family manage the archives of their cousin, a prolific New York City street photographer who had recently passed away, leaving behind her life’s work with no immediate family to inherit them. The first step was to help clear her apartment on Manhattan Avenue in Harlem. I felt it in my spine the instant I walked inside. There it was again. I was thunderstruck; the apartment was drenched in hazy sunlight, opening its eyes as if from an accidental nap, orienting itself to accommodate the entry of a new life force. Dusty jazz records sat stacked on top of each other with handwritten letters from friends, planning for the next show to attend. A colony of dust particles teased me every time I excavated battered notebooks from between books on the shelf and opened their pages to find fragments of affirmations scrawled across yellowing pages: the key is persistence; I have to keep moving.

I transported boxes of vintage prints back to the photographer’s cousin’s home in New Jersey where I would spend the next year working in the basement. I would always greet her when I entered her archives, promising to take great care of her work and apologizing if I crossed too many boundaries with my nosiness. Going box by box, I felt a jolt of electricity every time I came across a print signed with the photographer’s name Jill Freedman taking up the entire backside.

I time traveled with Jill. She took me to the protests against the Vietnam War in 1973 and showed me the flipside too: the intense faraway stare of an unsmiling veteran at the Home With Honor parade, donning an “I was in Vietnam and I’m proud of it” hat. A proud veteran, she writes on the back, yeah, just check the happy eyes. With every backside annotation, she lets me in on her thoughts with a dry wit that made me laugh aloud as if she were pulling me aside, pointing with her cigarette between her fingers and saying, hey, get a load of this. She takes me to the six week Poor People’s Campaign in Washington D.C and shows me the man who fell asleep on the bus ride there from Newark. When we arrive to the makeshift city, I’m introduced to the dancing couple, the beaming grandfather, the hand painted messages across walls that demand economic justice and civil rights. Most of all, though, I loved wandering New York City with Jill and watching the theater of the streets like a flaneur entranced by the present moment. All she really wanted was to capture real life, whatever that is. The fleeting became eternal in her images, letting me visit over and over again. I’d like to believe we became good friends after all our time together, melting the eerie solitude away in the archives.

Several months later the first gallery show of a Jill retrospective opened up on a warm October night glistening with a light drizzle. A cacophony of intellectual meanderings filled the tight space, bouncing off of pristine walls and well-dressed attendees who explain to one another with manicured gestures that in fact, the iconological symbolism in Freedman’s work is completely different from Arbus, it’s actually a commentary on —. Their analyses blended together in the background and the guests became muted in my peripheral vision when I locked eyes with a print I hadn’t visited in a long time. It was a wink across the room from Jill herself. The negative belonged to her first roll of film, bought on a whim and placed into a borrowed camera the fateful day that she woke up, snapped a few shots, and decided that was that. The elongated shadows of people standing in line stretched across the frame, washed over by a bright winter sun, living in their transitory moment for eternity. Hey, just stop for a second and look, it’s saying to me. I’m not sure how long I stood there until I shook myself out of the stillness and decided to go outside for a cigarette lit in Jill’s honor. Light droplets of rain fell on my jacket and the evening became languid when a familiar chill traversed up my spine and burned my muscles. I was in good company.

#jillfreedman #archives #photoraphy #shortstory #estatesale #blackandwhite

#JillFreedman #photography #LowerEastSide #NYC #70s https://www.instagram.com/p/CEeZrBvFD3C/?igshid=w8zrfskkw2ur

#jillfreedman #photography #lowereastside #nyc #70s

#JillFreedman #nyc Who we are, who are we... 🇺🇸 https://www.instagram.com/p/CEb6AiMlAqk/?igshid=oxbncqzvrzrm

#jillfreedman #nyc

Honoring Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. with 'Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968' “Now we are tired of being on the bottom. We are tired of being exploited. We are tired of not being able to get adequate jobs. We are tired of not getting promotions after we get those jobs. And as a result of our being tired, we are going to Washington, D.C., the seat of government, and engage in direct action for days and days, weeks and weeks, and months and months if necessary, in order to say to this nation that you must provide us with jobs or income.” —Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., from Jill Freedman: Resurrection City, 1968 @damiani_books #martinlutherking #resurrectioncity #jillfreedman #civilrights https://www.instagram.com/p/B7eEWYtppOA/?igshid=1j2w1kpsj74ka

#martinlutherking #resurrectioncity #jillfreedman #civilrights

#JillFreedman #kismithgallery #intheArtworld #photography #NewYork (at Ki Smith Gallery) https://www.instagram.com/p/B5y9rnAlQY8/?igshid=1hehgvmtwj93m

#jillfreedman #kismithgallery #intheartworld #photography #newyork