| Most people don’t pay much attention to the ordinary scenes that happen around them everyday. In fact, most of us can’t recognize the deeper art and beautiful compositions hidden there. However, some photographers have a special eye for capturing and showing us what a surprising and wonderful world we live in. Few can do it. Leonard Freed is one who can. |
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Reeling in the Years – Rieko Fujinami
Most people don’t pay much attention to the ordinary scenes that happen around them everyday. In fact, most of us can’t recognize the deeper art and beautiful compositions hidden there. However, some photographers have a special eye for capturing and showing us what a surprising and wonderful world we live in. Few can do it. Leonard Freed is one who can.
My first impression of Leonard Freed’s work was one of simple surprise. Are there really such scenes in the real world; such perfect compositions in black and white revealing the history, the cultural and personal mind of the person in the photograph? How can the photographer see it and at the same instant, capture it all on film?
He has traveled all around the world, but wherever he finds himself, he reveals a real sympathy with, and understanding of, the people in his photographs. This deep understanding comes partially from an interior “story” Freed creates about the person or situation, which may or may not, be actually true. Then, at the moment he exposes the film he forgets everything and it comes down to the mathematics of composition. This is the great foundation for his work. It reminds me of the words of an old Chinese scholar: “If you want to do something, you must learn everything, but when you do it you must forget about everything.”
For example, the print showing two priests in Rome having a snowball fight at first glance seems an innocent scene, just priests acting like children in the snow. But, as I looked longer, I felt a certain imbalance, a sense of anxiety coming from the image. When I asked Leonard about the background story of that photograph, he talked about finding a symbol of war in the men forgetting that they are grown priests and becoming caught up in aggression. War is started by those who forget to ask “who am I?” and lose their basic identity as human beings.
Everything came together in a fraction of a second, as his interior story and what he thought and felt about post-war Europe, synchronized with the white snow, the off balance priests in their black robes caught in a very particular moment in time and space. Freed uses a Leica camera with manual focus and exposure and the thin black border around most of his prints gives evidence that what the viewer sees is what he originally saw in the viewfinder.
The other artist, Bridget Freed, has been Leonard’s wife and artistic partner for 50 years. Her color digital photographs each feature one of her husband’s prints within some context, for example, hanging on a wall with reflections bouncing off the glass. She includes three different worlds in her work. Leonard’s photographs represent another time and place, while his prints are found in the present, mixed with reflections of the scene in which she placed them. This succeeds in bringing the viewer into a magical world in which past and present, two and three dimensions, all combine in a new time and place.
It’s as if she stands behind Leonard, watching his back, with strong purpose, love and empathic humor, placing him and his work into the heart of their life together. This exhibition makes an intriguing space to share for two photographers who have shared their lives for many years.
The selection of Leonard’s prints is also a small preview of the massive
250 print retrospective of his life-work to be held at the Muse´e de l’Elyse´e, in Lausanne, Switzerland later this year.
