Medium/Discipline: Photography
Birthplace: Baltimore, Maryland
Maryland Affiliation: Born here, Depicts Maryland subjects, Active while in residence
Prominent Theme: Baltimore, Maryland; folklife
Style/Period: documentary photography; photodocumentation; photojournalism
Gender: Male
Race/Ethnicity: Black/African-American
Biography: World-renowned photographer Roland L. Freeman is a native of Baltimore, Maryland who spent his childhood both working with arabbers in Baltimore City and living on a family-owned tobacco farm in Charles County until he was 18. The "arabbers," or street vendors who called out as they passed by in horse drawn wagons selling fruits and vegetables, continue to be a part of Baltimore culture despite having diminished greatly in number. At age eight, Freeman sold vegetables from a push-cart, and went on wagons with arabbers when he was 12. His grandmother, who had once arabbed, later told Freeman as he was becoming a photographer and folklorist, "You need to tell our story, and do us proud." (The Arabbers of Baltimore, p. ix.)
At age 18, Freeman joined the Air Force and served from 1954-1958 in Europe. During this time, he picked up photography as a hobby. While abroad, he met Black revolutionaries; when he returned to the U.S., he found that they had inspired him such that he told curator Tom Beck, "...the only thing I saw of importance going on was the movement for social justice." (A Baltimore Portfolio, n. p.) Early influences include African-American photographers Gordon Parks and Roy DeCarava, whose collaboration with Langston Hughes, Sweet Flypaper of Life, showed Freeman that "the things he wanted to put into photographs were important, especially to Black people." (Beck, Ibid., n. p.)
Roland Freeman's interest in the medium of photography as a career occurred in the early 1960s as the result of seeing a friend's exhibition at a Capitol Hill coffee house in Washington, D.C. Freeman joined Magnum, a photographer's cooperative, and became a freelance photographer with encouragement from Burk Uzzle, a Life magazine photographer. His career as a photojournalist began in 1967, with work done for the D.C. Gazette for which he soon became photo-editor. Freeman worked for Time magazine covering Capitol Hill and Civil Rights Movement demonstrations, all the while obtaining "a broader understanding of the devastating effects of institutional racism on the patterns and quality of African-American life." (David Driskell, A Baltimore Portfolio, n.p.) After this consciousness-raising occurred, Freeman departed from photojournalism, saying, "Once I decided it was photography I would use as the medium through which to communicate my views on that which was important to me - i.e., the black community - the greatest challenge was to strive for a clarity of what it was I understood and how best to show it." (Freeman, A Baltimore Portfolio, n.p.)
After leaving Baltimore and returning 20 years later in 1967, Freeman found that arabbers continued to work, but that their importance as a cultural tradition to the community needed to be preserved photographically. Roland Freeman was the first photographer to be awarded a Young Humanist Fellowship by the National Endowment for the Humanities (1970), which enabled him to begin a Baltimore photographic project, part of which included documenting the arabbers. This project held personal significance to him because arabbing was a part of his own heritage, and he wrote of the challenges he encountered by realizing that he must, "...unfailingly know whether I had succeeded as a documenter and preserver to do justice to the uniqueness of arabbers, and to clarify the importance of their contributions to our society." (Arabbers, p. ix) While Freeman considers himself a documentary photographer, he prefers to use the term photo-historian to describe his role: "The camera captures a moment in history, so I look at it as being a photo-historian." (A Baltimore Portfolio, n.p.) Throughout the 1970s, he began to collaborate with folklorists and authors on fieldwork projects in Black Americana and folk traditions. For the Baltimore project and later Black folklife projects in Mississippi and elsewhere, Freeman is committed to collaborating, and capturing the dialogue in which he engages, with the communities he photographs.
Freeman's assignments since the '60s have emphasized photojournalism and photodocumentation. Freeman served as researcher and director of various American Folklife Festivals, including several in which Maryland and Mississippi were the focus. He has been a research associate for the Smithsonian Institution's Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage since 1972, a faculty member at several universities (including being the first photographer-in-residence/research associate at the Institute for the Arts and Humanities at Howard University in Washington, D.C. from 1979-85), and during 1997, the Eudora Welty Visiting Professor of Southern Studies at Millsaps College (Jackson, MS). His numerous prestigious awards are listed farther below.
His successful photojournalistic career has included assignments for Time, Newsweek, National Geographic, London Sunday Times (England), Der Stern (Germany), and Paris-Match (France). Freeman has organized quilt exhibits that travel worldwide. He is available as a consultant for photo documentaries, exhibit planning and photography.
A major emphasis of Freeman's recent work is his ongoing self-assigned project "While There Is Still Time," a study of Black culture throughout the African Diaspora that uses the camera as a tool to research, document and interpret the continuity of traditional African-American folklife practices. This work is generally done in close collaboration with folklorists, historians, sociologists and community activists, often in methodologically innovative ways that have been integral to Freeman's contributions to the work of photographers of his generation. This project is one of many activities associated with The Group for Cultural Documentation (TGCD), which is located in Washington, D.C. where Roland Freeman lives. Roland Freeman founded TGCD and serves as its president. TGCD seeks to increase awareness, understanding and appreciation among individuals, communities and institutions of the nature, continuity, vitality and significance of our various cultural traditions, by preserving and documenting cultural traditions within and among communities, and developing deeper awareness and understanding among all those involved of the strength and value provided by community and national cultural diversity. TGCD undertakes projects that result in increased cultural understanding within and among cultural groups, using the mediums of photodocumentation, the arts, and the preservation of cultural traditions; local participants playing a major role in shaping the projects.
Freeman's work has been exhibited worldwide. Each of the publications by Roland Freeman listed below in the "Selected References" and "Other Publications" areas have been accompanied by a national/international touring exhibit. Fire in My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African-American Gospel (2001) won the Chicago Folklore Prize, an international award recognizing the most significant book in the discipline for the year. An alternate biography, and references to Freeman's magazine work, exhibits/artwork and major photographic essays, can be found on the TGCB web site.
Art-related Employment: documentary photographer; photojournalist; documentary photographer instructor (George Washington University, 1971-72); folklorist; founder and president, The Group for Cultural Documentation
Selected References: The Arabbers of Baltimore (Tidewater Publishers, Centreville, MD, 1989).
Contemporary Afro-American Photography. Exhibition, Oct. 6-Nov. 27, 1983. (Oberlin, OH: Allen Memorial Art Museum, Oberlin College), c1983.
Roland L. Freeman, A Baltimore Portfolio, 1968-1979: A Black Photographer Looks at His Hometown. Introd. by David C. Driskell; commentary by Tom Beck. (Catonsville, MD: University of Baltimore County Library), 1979.
Freeman, Roland L. The Group for Cultural Documentation Web site.
Other Publications: Hinson, Glenn. "Crafting Fictions, Telling Stories: Creative Collaboration in the Photography of Roland Freeman," EXPOSURE ed. by Tom Beck, 35:2, Fall 2002.
Something To Keep You Warm: The Roland Freeman Collection of Black American Quilts from the Mississippi Heartland. (Mississippi Department of Archives and History, 1979).
Southern Roads/City Pavements: Photographs of Black Americans. (International Center of Photography, New York, NY, 1981).
Stand By Me: African American Expressive Culture in Philadelphia. (Smithsonian Institution's Office of Folklife Programs, 1989).
Margaret Walker's 'For My People': A Tribute, Photographs by Roland L. Freeman. (University Press of Mississippi, Jackson and London, 1992).
A Communion of the Spirits: African-American Quilters, Preservers, and Their Stories. (Rutledge Hill Press, Nashville, TN, 1996).
The Mule Train: A Journey of Hope Remembered (Rutledge Hill Press, Nashville, TN, 1998).
Fire in My Bones: Transcendence and the Holy Spirit in African-American Gospel, by Glenn Hinson with photos by Freeman (University of Pennsylvania, 2000).
Maryland Institutions Holding Artworks: Albin O. Kuhn Library and Gallery, University of Maryland, Baltimore County
Awards: Young Humanist Fellowship, National Endowment for the Humanities (1970).
Masters of Photography Visual Arts Fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1982, 1991).
Living Legend Award for Distinguished Achievement in Photography from the National Black Arts Festival (1994).
Honorary Doctorate in Humane Letters from Millsaps College (1997).
Artist Contact Information: Through TGCD, 117 Ingraham Street, NW, Washington, D.C. 20011, info@tgcd.org, ph: 202.882.7764, fx: 202.829.6814
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