Leonard Freed (born October 23, 1929, Brooklyn, New York - died November 30, 2006, Garrison, New York) was an American photojournalist known for his photo essays on society and culture. Freed’s interest in photography began in the early 1950s during a trip to the Netherlands. In 1954, he returned to the United States where he took photography courses offered by noted Harper’s Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch at The New School for Social Research.

By 1958 Freed had published his first book of photographs, an account of post-World War II Jewish life in the Netherlands titled Joden van Amsterdam, married Brigitte Klück, and moved to Amsterdam. In the 1960s, Freed embarked on a freelance career in Europe and the United States with his wife by his side as his printer. During this time, his work centered on Black life in America and the civil rights movement. Freed assembled his material on these topics and published the book, Black in White America, in 1968. Freed also produced two films for Dutch television in the 1960s: Dansende Vromen (1963) and The Negro in America (1966).

In 1967, Freed’s photographu was shown alongside the work of five other photographers in an exhibition curated by Cornell Capa titled “The Concerned Photographer,” the contents of which were published the following year. Freed joined the Magnum Photography Collective, an agency co-founded in 1948 by Cornell’s brother Robert Capa, in 1972 and his work began appearing in major periodicals worldwide, including Life, Look, Der Spiegel, and The Sunday Times Magazine of London. He photographed the Yom Kippur War in 1973, as well as the activities of the New York Police Department in the 1970s for the book, Police Work, published in 1980.

Freed continued to work extensively in Europe and the United States in the 1980s and 1990s, which included photographing the fall of the Berlin Wall and the Romanian Revolution in 1989. A retrospective of Freed’s career, Leonard Freed: Photographies 1954-1990, was published in Paris in 1991. Freed published his last book, a collection of his photographs of older people from around the world, titled Another Life, in 2004. Freed died of prostate cancer in 2006, and in 2017, a photobiography of Freed, edited by his spouse Brigitte, was published with the title Leonard Freed: His Life and Work: 1929-2006.

References

Capa, Cornell, ed. The Concerned Photographer. New York: Grossman Publishers, 1968.

Freed, Leonard, William A. Ewing, Nathalie Herschdorfer, and Wim van Sinderen. Worldview. Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2007.

Gefter, Philip. “Leonard Freed, Photojournalist of Injustice, Is Dead at 77.” New York Times, December 4, 2006. https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/04/arts/design/04freed.html.

Hopkinson, Amanda. “Leonard Freed, Obituary.” The Guardian, December 6, 2006. https://www.theguardian.com/media/2006/dec/06/pressandpublishing.obituaries.

“Leonard Freed.” Magnum Photos. Accessed February 11, 2025. https://www.magnumphotos.com/photographer/leonard-freed/.