BEVERLY HILLS, Calif., August 16, 2023 (Newswire.com)
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Liu Shiming, celebrated as a sculptor in his native China, thinks and speaks like a philosopher. “You should look at life like a child does,” he wrote in his diary in 1982. “When you take the perspective of an innocent child, all love and everything in life feels fresh and lovely.”
Roland L. Freeman, a photographer who documented Black life for more than a half-century including vanishing quilt-making traditions in the rural South and civil rights struggles on the doorstep of the Capitol, died Aug. 7 at his home in the District. He was 87.
Mr. Freeman had heart-related health problems, said his wife, Marcia Freeman.
Mr. Freeman’s self-taught style — using 35-millimeter film, nearly always in black and white since the 1960s — was deeply rooted in documentary traditions of detached observation and intimate portraiture. He also viewed his work as part folklorist and social researcher.
He became a quilt designer himself, using a technique to transfer photographs onto cloth. The patterns were stitched together in Mississippi and elsewhere in quilts intended to reflect Black struggles, solidarity and history.
“I think of my work as a project,” he told a documentary in 1983, “a project that deals with the migration patterns of Black people, what happens to their traditional culture when they leave the rural areas and come to urban areas, how their traditions change, how new ones come about.”
Mr. Freeman’s books and major exhibitions around the world received widespread acclaim for his grass-roots view of Black culture and traditions “that is unparalleled in the history of American photography,” wrote Glenn Hinson, associate professor of anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
The book “The Arabbers of Baltimore” (1989) looked at the once-thriving culture of the city’s mobile street vendors, which had included his uncle and other relatives during his boyhood. The images in “Southern Roads/City Pavements: Photographs of Black Americans” (1981) evoke the history of the Great Migration of Blacks from the South to Northern cities that began in the early 20th century.
Mr. Freeman’s lens was, at times, a glimpse into a passing world. In 1975, he captured fiddler Scott Dunbar in mid-stroke with his bow on a cigar-box violin in Mississippi. In 1985 in Africatown, Ala., a dignified elder, Violet Allen, stared directly into Mr. Freeman’s camera while seated and holding her cane.
Other photos of protests and struggles bridge the decades from the 1960s to the era of Black Lives Matter and modern activism. Mr. Freeman stood at the Mississippi-Alabama border in June 1968 to photograph the passing of the Poor People’s Campaign mule train rolling slowly toward the National Mall in Washington, where protesters erected a “Resurrection City” camp to call attention to chronic poverty.
Five years earlier, Mr. Freeman was in the crowd for the Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial in August 1963. The ripples from the March on Washington set Mr. Freeman’s life work in motion.
Shortly after Rev. King’s speech, 10 photographs from the gathering were displayed in Mr. Freeman’s neighborhood near Eastern Market. Mr. Freeman had already started an interest in photography while stationed in Paris with the Air Force in the 1950s, taking snapshots with a Brownie Hawkeye camera he won in craps game. The images from the National Mall and Rev. King’s speech left him spellbound.
“I stared at those pictures the rest of the night,” Mr. Freeman recalled in a 2021 interview with the Ogden Museum of Southern Art in New Orleans. “I said to myself, ‘This is how I am going to say something about the times in which we live’ … I’m going to be a photographer.”
The next day, he borrowed a Minolta camera from his roommate, whose mother had brought it at a duty-free shop during a Caribbean cruise. The roommate never got the Minolta back. “I wore it out in a couple of years,” Mr. Freeman said. His early style was influenced by the social-justice spirit of photographer Gordon Parks and Roy DeCarava, whose images of residents in a Harlem tenement reminded Mr. Freeman of his upbringing in Baltimore in a large family where money was tight.
In 1967, Mr. Freeman landed a job at the D.C. Gazette and was the newspaper’s photo editor from 1968 to 1973. After that, he began to roam, always trying to save money by eating on the cheap or charming his way into sleeping on someone’s couch.
For decades, Mr. Freeman crisscrossed the country — back roads in the Deep South, and alleyways and street corners in Northern cities — on projects that became part of his first books, including “Folkroots: Images of Mississippi Black Folklife, 1974—1976” published in 1977, and “Roland L. Freeman, a Baltimore Portfolio, 1968—1979” released in 1979. He also found work as a Washington-based contributor for the international photo agency Magnum and magazines such as Life and Essence.
His interest in folk art and traditions deepened with each road trip, taking photos of people who kept alive the crafts of weaving baskets or woodworking. Above all was Mr. Freeman’s fascination with quilts — as visual stories of communities and the shared bonds of the women who gather to make them. He built a personal collection of about 180 quilts and served on groups including the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage.
In his 1996 book on Black quilters, “A Communion of the Spirits,” Mr. Freeman described how he sought “healing” power from quilts as he successfully battled cancer in the early 1990s.
“It isn’t a matter of southern folk culture being so appealing to me. That’s not it,” he told the National Endowment for the Arts in a 2007 interview. “I’m interested in traditional folklife practices. And in a lot of places in the South, a lot of those folklife practices are closer to what they were 50 to 100 years ago than in a lot of other places.”
Roland Leeon Freeman was born July 27, 1936, in Baltimore, where his father worked in construction, and his mother was a homemaker. He struggled in school with undiagnosed dyslexia and increasingly spent his time on the streets. His mother worried about his son’s future if he stayed in Baltimore.
At 12, he was sent to live outside La Plata, Md., with a tobacco-farming family that took in city children. He stayed until he was 18, then served in the Air Force from 1954 to 1958. “I was exposed to the African diaspora,” he said of his time in Paris meeting students and self-exiles from colonial-era Africa. “I had never even heard that word before.”
As Mr. Freeman explored the rural South, he credited his years on the tobacco farm as helping ease suspicions about a newcomer from the city. He could talk with confidence about growing cycles and old-style tricks such as a potato pump, an earthen mound used to preserve vegetables.
“You’re in Mississippi. You run into an old farmer. Maybe you’re at a hog-killing at Percy Creek. You got your cameras but you ain’t snapping yet,” he told The Washington Post in 1993. “You ask him, ‘You put anything in the potato pump this year?’ Suddenly you’ve got his attention.”
Survivors include his wife of 55 years, the former Marcia Elaine Felton; and two half sisters and a half brother.
In one of Mr. Freeman’s rare photographs without a person in the frame, he took an image in a hallway in a home in Americus, Ga., in 1971. Amid the bare lightbulb and vase of plastic flowers, a hazy outline appears in a mirror that is likely Mr. Freeman and his tripod. Next to the mirror is a memorial card with three portraits: President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert and Rev. King.
As disaster recovery efforts ramp up on Maui, so too has the arduous search operation. The confirmed death toll now stands at 106 people and with most of those victims still unidentified, families and friends of the missing are left fearing the worst. Historic landmarks, art and artifacts have also been destroyed. Noelani Ahia discussed the cultural loss with Geoff Bennett.
A farm shop in Hayling Island has had to remind visitors that nudity is banned as they pose for ‘naked’ photos in the sunflower crop.
People have been posing for nude photos and using the flowers to protect their modesty.
On Facebook, Stoke Fruit Farm wrote: ‘Reminder to all we are a family area and please keep your clothes on in the sunflowers!
‘We are having an increase of reports of naked photography taking place and this must not happen during our public sessions please.’ The post was accompanies by a ‘no topless’ sign.
Visitor Sarah-Jane Cruddas said her young son had come across a woman wearing nothing but a skimpy thong last Thursday. She wrote: ‘Our son got a right eyeful – should have seen his face!’
![A farm shop in Hayling Island has had to remind visitors that nudity is banned as they pose for nude photos in the sunflower crop. [Stock Image]](https://www.mecreates.com/story/news/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/74400879-12414775-image-a-18_1692222002340.jpg)
Sunflowers are a symbol of the true-story Calendar Girls about women who pose in the nude for charity. A film adaptation was made in 2003 and starred Helen Mirren and Julie Walters.
The sunflower fields previously hosted an official charity photoshoot inspired by the film and stage musical, which sees women pose tastefully nude to raise funds for cancer.
But the farm shop reminded visitors that during it’s public hours it is a ‘family area’ and it has to ‘protect what children see on our site’.
They added: ‘We are open to family’s which means during this time we have to conduct the site in a manner which is appropriate to all!’
Last year the business advertised a black bra as lost property for collection.
The farm shop’s director Sam Wilson told The Sun it was a ‘shame’ the fun of taking risky photos is being challenged by blatant nudity in the family field.
MINNEAPOLIS — On the corner of 8th Street and Hennepin Avenue, a display of heartfelt poetry and photography.
“I see friends. I see family. I see people who I’ve struggled with. All walks of life, all genders, all races. But there is a common thread. We have that experience with the criminal legal system,” said Antonio Williams, a former inmate-turned author.
Williams spent 14 years incarcerated in Rush City prison.
“Every year spent in prison is like a chapter ripped from the best book ever written. Even after you’re released, pieces of your life story are missing,” said Williams, quoting from his poem about his time in prison.
Other lines refer to the difficulties of life on the outside.
“The colors of love are duller. The texture of affection doesn’t soothe the same,” read Williams.
Williams is among those featured in an exhibit on the Hennepin Theatre Trust’s sidewalk gallery.
“There’s a real strong marriage between social justice, social service agencies, and the arts. There’s an expression of what needs to be shared, whether it be the thoughts, the feelings or the wants of a community,” said Todd Duesing, President & CEO of Hennepin Theatre Trust.
The project is a collaboration between the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop and We Are All Criminals, with the support of several other non-profits including “The Waiting Room” podcast with Nadine Graves.
“There are people that are in the system, outside of the system coming home that want to take that mic back and change that narrative and change the story that’s being told about them,” said Graves
Graves experienced it first-hand. A difficult childhood led to a criminal record at a young age.
“I ended up leaving the state of Minnesota to be in an environment where I wasn’t constantly reminded of my criminal record. Went to college, did extremely well, studied sociology and criminal justice at an HBCU and came back to Minnesota where I was able to show the courts that I had rehabilitated myself through having access and resources and tools,” explained Graves.
“The harm that I caused, now, that is who I am. The system has told us that is who we are as people and it’s not true. I’m a father. I’m someone who cares deeply about my community. I’m a homeowner,” said Williams.
Graves and Williams hope telling their stories will achieve change in the system and how we think about those in it.
“To not be shackled by their criminal record or their past,” said Graves.
They’re no different from our fathers, from our brothers, our sisters, our children. These are our people and I see them,” said Williams.
The gallery is up through Sept. 11.
Graves was recently selected as a 2023 Bush Fellow. Williams just launched a book that he wrote while incarcerated called “The Dream Weaver.”
With skyscrapers rising around her, an ambitious photographer seized the opportunity to record New York’s 1920s building boom.
If you were an American artist or writer in the 1920s, Paris was where you wanted to be. The Springfield, Ohio-born photographer Berenice Abbott (1898-1991) arrived there in 1921 by way of New York, and by early 1929 she had managed to establish herself in the French capital’s flourishing interwar avant-garde scene — first working as an assistant to Man Ray and later taking her own celebrated portraits of luminaries such as James Joyce and Djuna Barnes. She even changed the spelling of her name from “Bernice” to the more Gallic “Berenice.”
Yet somehow this magnet for culturally minded expatriates lost its hold on Abbott the moment she set foot in Lower Manhattan — on a messy January day, no less — at the beginning of what was supposed to be a short trip back to the United States. She had lived in New York once, just eight years before, but in her absence the city had been scaled up: new skyscrapers were rising, the population was exploding, and every block, it seemed, was abuzz with commerce and construction. (The market crash of October 1929 was still many months away). Suddenly, Paris was passé. “When I saw New York again, and stood in the dirty slush,” she later recalled, “I felt that here was the thing I had been wanting to do all my life.”
“Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929,” a small but inspiring show at the Metropolitan Museum, channels the exhilaration Abbott felt upon arriving in the city. The exhibition’s focus is a disbound scrapbook with seven to nine photographs per page, all taken over the course of that year, as Abbott paced the streets (and piers, bridges and train platforms) with a hand-held camera and a compulsion to capture New York’s unruly, cutthroat modernity.
With its 32 pages of small contact prints processed at drugstores and commercial labs (or as Abbott called them, “tiny photographic notes”), the album can be seen as a rough draft of her well-known Works Progress Administration project of the 1930s, “Changing New York.” (Several examples from this later series are in the Met show, including a disconcertingly ethereal view of Seventh Avenue taken from the top of a 46-story building in the garment district.) But Abbott’s “New York Album” is a fascinating artwork in its own right, an adrenalized and ambitious alignment of artist and subject.
Abbott felt that the changing city needed an equivalent to the French photographer Eugène Atget (1857-1927), who had documented Paris during a critical period of transition in the late 19th and early 20th centuries with what Abbott called “the shock of realism unadorned.” She had come to New York as part of an impassioned effort to promote Atget’s oeuvre, one that included purchasing the photographer’s archive after his death and making her own prints from his glass-plate negatives; in the “New York Album” she goes further, becoming, in effect, his heir.
The Met’s exhibition incorporates several Atget photographs from the museum’s collection, including one that Abbott was known to admire; it shows an early automobile garage in the Fifth Arrondissement, with a Renault parked in a cobblestoned courtyard. A similar appreciation for the collision of the newfangled with the outmoded can be seen throughout Abbott’s “New York Album,” in shots of skyscrapers looming over rows of tenements and, in one more subtle and almost surreal case, an overhead view of an equine statue photographed from the Ninth Avenue El.
Although the album is not strictly organized by location, it has a distinct cartography. Abbott gravitated to certain neighborhoods that, for her, showed the face of the new city emerging. Many of them were in Lower Manhattan; multiple pages are devoted to the Lower East Side, where she was drawn to storefronts and their simultaneously poetic and transactional signage, and the Financial District, where she often pointed her camera skyward to exaggerate the intimidating height of new corporate towers.
Unlike peers such as Walker Evans, she did not take much of an interest in the human subject — or, at least, in individuals. To her, the city was a human construction and humanity was implicit in every part of it. “You’re photographing people when you’re photographing a city,” she explained in a documentary film about her life. “You don’t have to have a person in it.”
As Abbott’s biographer has noted, she was influenced by the French literary movement of Unanimism, which emphasized collective consciousness and expression. You can sense this especially in her shots of the city’s elevated train system, which revel in the formal modernism of all that interlaced steel and cast iron without losing sight of its function of moving millions of people.
As an extension of the exhibition, the Met has created a helpful digital map that identifies some of the subjects in Abbott’s album and updates them with present-day photographs (a collaboration between the Met curator of photography who organized the exhibition, Mia Fineman, and the Jones Family Research Collective, led by the Manhattan borough historian emeritus, Celedonia Jones, until his death last April). It reveals, for example, that the site of a burlesque theater on Houston Street photographed by Abbott is now a Whole Foods.
Visitors to the exhibition can spend a lot of time testing their own knowledge of the city’s geography, but the pleasures of the show have more to do with the drive and dynamism behind the pictures. “Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929” takes us back to an invigorating moment in the history of the metropolis, captured on the fly by an emergent modern artist.
During her upbringing in Ohio, Abbott had planned to be a journalist — she attended Ohio State University’s School of Journalism before turning to art — and it’s clear from her photography that she never lost that instinct for wanting to be where the story was. In those early months of 1929 she recognized that New York was the big story; looking at her “New York Album” gives us hope that it could be again.
Berenice Abbott’s New York Album, 1929
Through Sept. 4, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue, 212-535-7710; metmuseum.org.
