Roland Leon Freeman

Background

Roland Freeman was born on July 27, 1936 in Baltimore, Maryland, United States.

Education

Roland Freeman was sent from the streets of an urban environment to a southern Maryland tobacco farm at age 13 by a loving mother who foresaw disaster for him if he did not get away from the city. When Freeman was 14, he met author and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston, who would also be a great influence on his subsequent career.

He served in the US Air Force from 1954 to 1958. Roland Freeman began taking photographs in the DC area in 1963, inspired by the March on Washington.

Career

In 1963, Roland Freeman decided that photography would be his medium, and he had his first one-man show six years later. Freeman's emphasis on documenting the African American urban and rural experience began with the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. On that date 200, 000 African and white Americans gathered in a peaceful protest to pressure the U. S. government to guarantee African Americans legal equality. Inspired by that event, Roland Freeman decided to use the medium of photography to report on the lives of ordinary people.

Roland Freeman became familiar with the photographs of Gordon Parks. His work was influenced by Roy DeCarava, whose pictures of family life in a Harlem tenement reminded Freeman of his own family. Through a chance meeting with photographer Burk Uzzle, he began his photographic career with a borrowed camera. He began working for the D.C. Gazette in 1967 and was the newspaper's photo editor from 1968 to 1973.

In 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. , he photographed the mule-train march of the Poor People's Campaign from rural Mississippi to Washington, D.C. , as a Southern Christian Leadership Conference photographer. That experience crystallized his commitment to be a witness documentarian of the changes in the lives of African Americans as new civil rights legislation opened doors that previously were closed to African Americans. Documented the South using his camera as a tool of research as well as a form of creative expression, Roland Freeman travelled through the backwoods of the rural South, gaining the trust of African American artisans and craftsmen who permitted him to photograph intimate details of their lives. He photographed African American congregations going to river baptisms, railroad workers laying tracks, blacksmiths at work and at home, and quilters with their wares. Presenting intimate closeups of their faces, homes, and daily activities, he presented not only a concentrated experience of the way African Americans view their world, but also a vision of a good life lived in small communities by loving people with satisfying work. His sensitive portrayals were not, however, limited to one racial group. Some of his finest pictures were a "White Ghetto" series made in his native Baltimore. In those photographs, Native Americans and poor whites from Appalachia turn their backs or loll defiantly in front of Freeman's camera, touching each other reassuringly as they face his lens.

During the 1976 Roland Freeman became the Washington stringer for Magnum Photos, Inc. and worked for various magazines, such as LIFE, Black Enterprise, and Essence. These experiences helped give his work the journalist's succinctness. He also taught photography to students at such universities as George Washington and Howard and directed the Mississippi Folk Life Project.

Among his 12 one-man shows and eight group shows, two of Freeman's exhibitions were circulated nationally and internationally on extended tours. "Folkroots: Images of Mississippi Black Folklife" (1974 - 1976) opened in Mississippi and subsequently toured museums and galleries around the country. In 1981 "Southern Roads/City Pavements: Photos of Black Americans," one of his finest accomplishments, opened at the International Center of Photography in New York City.

In 1982 the U. S. Information Agency sponsored a three-year African and European tour of the exhibition. Quilts Caught Eye, Imagination African American quilters captured Freeman's imagination and held it fast for more than two decades. In his 1996 book, A Communion of the Spirits: African-American Quilters, Preservers and Their Stories, documents his foray into the world of African American quilts. The book describers the comfort Freeman found in quilts as a child and continues to explain how the man became intrigued and impassioned by quilts, quiltmakers, and their stories. In fact, when Roland Freeman was diagnosed with cancer in 1991, he sought "healing" from quilts. For his work behind the camera, Freeman was recognized by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Black Arts Festival through its 1994 Living Legend Award.

Achievements

• In 1970, Roland Freeman became the first photographer to be awarded a Young Humanist Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Humanities. He has received two Masters of Photography Visual Arts Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, one in 1982 and another in 1991. Roland Freeman received the Living Legend Award for Distinguished Achievement in Photography from the National Black Arts Festival in 1994. In 1997, he received an Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Millsaps College. He is a recipient of a 2007 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the NEA, which is the United States' highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.

Works

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• book

  • The Mule Train: A Journey of Hope Remembered

    (The Mule Train, about 150 people in twenty mule-drawn wag...)

    1998
  • A Communion of the Spirits: African-American Quilters, Preservers, and Their Stories

    (Looks at the wide variety of roles that quilting plays in...)

    1996
  • Margaret Walker's "For My People": A Tribute

    (Half a century ago a young woman published a poem that wa...)

    1992
  • The Arabbers of Baltimore 1989
  • Southern Roads/City Pavements: Photographs of Black Americans 1981

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