#jillfreedman

The end of my adolescence was spent in solitude. It was not a voluntary way of being, at least not in the beginning. But eventually I began to identify with it and several self-imposed solitary practices were born out of an inability to find peace within the stillness. One of which was my habit of visiting estate sales that evolved into something of a ritual in its entirety: each weekend, I would prepare to drive to a new location, enter a home, and begin a new acquaintanceship. The moment I walked into these homes a profound heaviness fell upon me like a thick blanket, immobilizing me until I could begin to absorb that which I was experiencing. 

  Gaining access to what was once one’s home, filled with the remnants of their lives, were some of the most intimate moments I had ever experienced at that point in my life. I felt I had become an accidental voyeur, walking into bedrooms and discovering elegantly strewn slippers next to the bed and perfectly crooked toothbrushes still poking out of their holders in the bathroom. Kitchen table conversations would echo in my mind with voices I had never heard before as I observed the magnetized kitsch on the fridge and chipped paint on the chairs. Sometimes, an electrifying energy would snake up my spine and burn through my muscles. This was beyond superstition. It was especially powerful on the occasions that I bumped into decaying family photographs with their eternally forced smiles and coiffed hairdos and unblinking eyes gazing back at me as if to say what are you doing here? 

 Roland Barthes wrote about the punctum of a photograph: a particular detail, different for every onlooker, that pierces or punctures or wounds them in an inexplicable way. It’s never quite the same for any two viewers; it is an interpretation from one’s own visceral experience. I wonder if he would have been overcome with the same grief that washed over me every time I placed these images back into their closets and parted ways with the lives I had intersected with for just a moment until they prepared for the next. 

I was well seasoned with this practice when I got a phone call from an old teacher asking if I’d be interested in helping a local family manage the archives of their cousin, a prolific New York City street photographer who had recently passed away, leaving behind her life’s work with no immediate family to inherit them. The first step was to help clear her apartment on Manhattan Avenue in Harlem. I felt it in my spine the instant I walked inside. There it was again. I was thunderstruck; the apartment was drenched in hazy sunlight, opening its eyes as if from an accidental nap, orienting itself to accommodate the entry of a new life force. Dusty jazz records sat stacked on top of each other with handwritten letters from friends, planning for the next show to attend. A colony of dust particles teased me every time I excavated battered notebooks from between books on the shelf and opened their pages to find fragments of affirmations scrawled across yellowing pages: the key is persistence; I have to keep moving.

 I transported boxes of vintage prints back to the photographer’s cousin’s home in New Jersey where I would spend the next year working in the basement. I would always greet her when I entered her archives, promising to take great care of her work and apologizing if I crossed too many boundaries with my nosiness. Going box by box, I felt a jolt of electricity every time I came across a print signed with the photographer’s name Jill Freedman taking up the entire backside. 

I time traveled with Jill. She took me to the protests against the Vietnam War in 1973 and showed me the flipside too: the intense faraway stare of an unsmiling veteran at the Home With Honor parade, donning an “I was in Vietnam and I’m proud of it” hat. A proud veteran, she writes on the back, yeah, just check the happy eyes. With every backside annotation, she lets me in on her thoughts with a dry wit that made me laugh aloud as if she were pulling me aside, pointing with her cigarette between her fingers and saying, hey, get a load of this. She takes me to the six week Poor People’s Campaign in Washington D.C and shows me the man who fell asleep on the bus ride there from Newark. When we arrive to the makeshift city, I’m introduced to the dancing couple, the beaming grandfather, the hand painted messages across walls that demand economic justice and civil rights. Most of all, though, I loved wandering New York City with Jill and watching the theater of the streets like a flaneur entranced by the present moment. All she really wanted was to capture real life, whatever that is. The fleeting became eternal in her images, letting me visit over and over again. I’d like to believe we became good friends after all our time together, melting the eerie solitude away in the archives.