Content area
Full Text
Jill Freedman
Daniel Cooney Fine Art
All cops are bastards! This antiauthoritarian rallying cry originated in England about a century ago and pervaded certain pockets of New Left activism during the 1960s and ’70s, a period when Jill Freedman (1939–2019) found her footing as a self-taught documentary photographer. She picked up a camera for the first time in 1966; two years later, following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., she participated in the Poor People’s Campaign in Washington, DC, and documented the Resurrection City protest camp around the National Mall. Having witnessed mass arrests and police brutality, Freedman was far from being an apologist for law enforcement. A decade later, however, she embarked on a three-year ride-along with officers from Manhattan’s Midtown South and East Village precincts.
“Street Cops 1978–1981,” Freedman’s exhibition here, featured more than fifty gelatin silver prints from the eponymous series, which was originally published as a book in 1981. A central wall in the gallery displayed an eight-by-seven grid of police portraits—with few people of color and women pictured—along with the introductory text from Freedman’s volume. “Street...