Leonard Freed, a prominent photojournalist and member of the Magnum Photography Collective who was known primarily for his in-depth coverage of African-Americans in the era of the civil rights movement, died on Wednesday, November 29, at his home in Garrison, N.Y. He was 77.

Born in Brooklyn on Oct. 23, 1929, to working-class Jewish parents of Eastern European descent, Mr. Freed first set out to become a painter. But at 24, traveling in the Netherlands, he began taking pictures and decided that that was what he wanted to do. In 1954 he returned to the United States and studied in the “design laboratory” photography class given by the Harper’s Bazaar art director Alexey Brodovitch. He began working as a freelance photographer in 1961.

“Photography is a visual language still in its infancy,” Mr. Freed said about his own work. “The fact that millions of people can see the same visual images on television, in films or photography is communication. Saddening to think that literary traditions are being lost to a language that is only in its infancy. Challenging in that one is free to be original.”

{ NY Times | Continue reading | Read more: PDN | Leonard Freed | Magnum photos }

{ Behind-the-scenes coverage of the NYPD in the late 1970s | all photos by Leonard Freed, Police Work, 1980 }

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