The Incendiary Photography of Jill Freedman
Jill Freedman and Demonstrator, Poor People's campaign, Washington, D.C., 1968. Jill Freedman, Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery. When she was twenty-six years old, Jill Freedman saw policemen knocking down Vietnam War protesters in New York City. Passionately anti-war, she asked a friend for a camera and began photographing their confrontations. She had never used a camera before, but everything clicked into place. “I knew that I had found my thing,” she said. “It’s like music, the rhythm of it. Photography was just natural to me.”
A Pittsburgh native, Freedman grew up in the heavily Jewish Squirrel Hill neighborhood. She still has fond memories of Mrs. Weinstein’s Deli, famous for its latkes and blintzes. She majored in sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, but spent her junior and senior years singing in a jazz group that played in steelworker bars. “You could do what you wanted,” she said. “Nobody was listening.” After graduation, she headed to Israel by ocean liner, spending 1961 and ‘62 in an apartment above the famous Bezalel Art School and singing in local clubs. These were modest performances, she said, adding that she “played the seven chords that
