About This Image

Signed, titled, and dated in pencil, and with copyright and vintage stamps, verso. On 11 x 14 in. sheet.

Leonard Freed was an American documentary photojournalist and longtime Magnum Photos member. Freed was born October 23, 1929, in Brooklyn, NY to Jewish, working-class parents of Eastern European descent. In 1956 he met Brigitte Klück, who became his wife, while on assignment for Look in Rome.

Freed had wanted to be a painter, but began taking photographs in the Netherlands and discovered a new passion. He traveled in Europe and Africa before returning to the United States where he attended The New School and studied with Alexey Brodovitch, the art director of Harper's Bazaar. In 1958 he moved to Amsterdam to photograph its Jewish community.

Throughout the 1960s he worked as a freelance photojournalist, documenting the Civil Rights Movement in America (1964–1965), the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and the New York City police department (1972–1979). He traveled the country with Martin Luther King Jr. in King's celebrated march across the U.S. from Alabama to Washington DC, publishing his book "Black in White America" (1968) in the process.

Edward Steichen purchased three photographs from him for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. In 1967, Cornell Capa selected Freed as one of five photographers to participate in his Concerned Photography exhibition. Freed joined Magnum Photos in 1972. Freed's work was included in the 2025 exhibition Photography and the Black Arts Movement, 1955–1985 at the National Gallery of Art.

Besides his photojournalist work, Freed is also well known for his artistic nudes, which he made primarily with one model, Kate, as a collaborator.

Freed died in Garrison upstate New York of prostate cancer on November 29, 2006.

His photographs are in the collections of the New York Museum of Modern Art, the U.S. Library of Congress, the National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), the Jewish Museum Berlin, the International Center of Photography (New York), the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, DC, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Jewish Museum, New York, the High Museum and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, among others.

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