encounter Jill freedman Street Jazz By Jonas Cuénin he Jill Freedman charm is someone for whom there’s on each other. We’re the depra- is just so hard to resist. At only a thin line between plea- ved monkeys you see in Hol- t seventy-five this lifelong sure and pain. Milk-white winter lywood movies. Ten years from lover of endless chats and pri- outside, her tropical living room now there might be no water or celess anecdotes has you spell- inside: from her comfortable food left, and people don’t seem bound one minute and laughing leather armchair she jams with to care. Animals, as a rule, only out loud the next. Not driven by words and stories, then without kill to eat. That’s why I find any inner need, or because she’s warning goes into a rock’n’roll politics so hard to put up with. “What saddens me showing off, but out of the same rant against the rottenness of a History is repeating itself indefi- is that at my age I generosity that pervades her world she will pillory until her nitely. Did you see any bankers have no faith in the photography—an oeuvre harking dying day. Most of the time she’s behind bars after the big crisis? back to a time when authorial striking back against the lunatic Everyone’s so pleased with them- goodness of human compassion was the yardstick bombast of the women newsrea- selves for getting Obama elected. nature.” images were measured by. In her ders on CNN and Fox News, deli- A president who’s a danger to Harlem apartment, with Central cious victims she turns on at the freedom of the press and in Park a stone’s throw away, she noon with her latest toys: HD love with drones. You don’t get brings the same warmth and ten- Ready screen, Apple TV, MacBook to where he did by being Mr Nice derness to serving coffee as she Air. Freedman is the “peace cor- Guy. I can’t get all these stories does to the people in her pictures. respondent” she’s always wanted and conflicts out of my mind. I Visitors are rare in this place that to be, permanently angered by think it comes from what happe- looks like a shrine—and with Jill American policy and, in this ned in Paris. Those poor people. Freedman looking like the keeper month of January, very moved That really touches me. Make me of the flame. There’s no obvious by the Charlie Hebdo massacre. stop...” order: prints are jumbled with Each event, each tragedy, trig- books and personal notebooks gers the deep, intense look and rebel with a big heart, in an archive that makes you the empathy for the underdog Freedman is also a mar- think of a treasure trove; and which, in this world of ours, can a velous storyteller. A gives you an irresistible urge shock and sometimes disturb. bohemian with her own set of to rummage through a life that From the home that is her refuge, excesses, blind spots, and fears— seems way out of the ordinary. A Freedman brings an acute eye the same as all the others, and life Freedman enjoys recounting to the 21st century. Makes you even those who hid it, like Cartier- via numberless comedy routines think of Chris Marker, the Red, Bresson the drinker, Doisneau the and hilarious one-liners, against holed up in his Paris apartment insecure—together with the gut a constant musical background and studying the evolution of his obsession they share: to work for shot through with syncopation fellow humans on TV. A strange the good of humanity. She insists and jazz overtones. An unbroken kind of observation, this, passion that she’s still only twelve, and theater that turns her images mixed with a laziness in power- can see herself turning thirteen into fables and reveals her as ful contrast with her intellectual soon—but what for? “Twelve— much more than a virtuoso vitality. There are a few regrets, not a bad age to already know photographer. Big blue eyes, red too: “What saddens me is that at everything about everything.” cheeks, throaty voice, disheveled my age I have no faith in the Her bohemia is total non-identi- hair: she looks like a street clown, goodness of human nature. I tend fication, being able to change her a force of nature—and every to like everybody, but with the mind about everything, having word brings the kind of transfi- firm conviction that any other fun with her friends, partying, guration you find in remarkably animal species is more highly having lots of lovers and phy- gifted interpreters of life. Freed- evolved than us. All we do is des- sical affection—and traveling man might love play-acting, but troy. All we do with this high- of course, literally and figura- she also has her serious side: this speed information is use it to spy tively. She seems to have lived 29 encounter encounter a thousand lives. Looking back on the famous BBC Tonight Show. even know. I liked that straight tainly have something to do with “A mind is like a parachute. It does not work if it is not open.” to a happy childhood, she talks “Just me and my guitar,” she says off.” it, because I’ve been obsessed by about her passion for softball— proudly. “When the money ran the Holocaust all my life.” baseball’s kid brother, but played out we did another show, and It was in the Village that she with a bigger ball. The only girl so on.” One of her great expe- deepened her visual and literary efore she bought her first in her school team, the Mighty riences of the time still sets her side, developed a taste for words camera “on a whim” in 1965, wouldn’t have taken all those marked by a slightly sexy nai- Clyde Beatty-Cole Brothers Circus of travelling and performances— Midgets, she was shortstop, fiel- eyes sparkling: going back to the with a real edge to them, and an b Jill Freedman was recor- photos in the thick of things. I ate vety which is nothing other than in the Northeastern United States, that began almost on Freedman’s ding between second and third States on board the legendary obsession with quotations: rea- ding images in her imagination: and demonstrated and slept with a profound honesty—a word that the atmosphere is an indescri- doorstep: “It all started when I base; as a batter she came in Queen Mary; five days looking ching into an old drawer, she snapshots engraved on her visual all the others, often in churches today, in an art world obsessed bably magic mix of joy and met Cleopatra, a drag queen from fourth, the «cleanup» position: out over the immensity of the pulls out four fat envelopes full memory that were preludes to in the towns we passed through.” with challenges, can seem ana- drama: a crazy tale of men and the Village. A great lady. She told “One day I hit two home runs in ocean. “It was a great period. I’ve of bits of paper with the ones some of the photos she would chronistic. The seven books she animals living side by side, told me about a circus where she rode a row. I was the one who would always loved that kind of free- that have marked her most writ- take a little later on. Her subjects: reedman has always had has to her credit take us into in a hundred photos imbued with elephants wearing a satin dress drive you home.” dom. That’s why I never married. ten or typed on them. Hundreds the war in Vietnam, and anti-war an instinctive preference the daily life of societies that are an incredible tenderness. A man and a feather boa. I loved the All my life my boyfriends were of sentences, including one from and civil rights demonstrations. F for the inaccessible, and “closed”, at least from the point head to head with an elephant; story at once. I borrowed a Volk- “Coming to always a little jealous. I always John Steinbeck that partly sums At the time she was working as for slipping in amongst people of view of the common man. a clown putting on his makeup swagen kombi and headed off New York is wanted to be out and about, up the soul of America: “In the an advertising copywriter—the she knows nothing—or almost Leafing through them, you can’t as a cat sleeps tranquilly beside in search of a circus of my own. always a way spending time in my darkroom, United States the poor see them- only real job she has ever had— nothing—about. It would be help thinking about the splendid him; as far as you can get from With the Clyde Beatty-Cole Bro- going out to listen to jazz. Getting selves not as an exploited prole- and spending every pay packet mistaken, though, to think that sentence from Frank Zappa she the jungle, an elephant pushing a thers Circus we traveled at night, of getting away married meant staying home. Out tariat but as temporarily embar- on equipment. “There was my this vast curiosity—the leading once noted down: “A mind is like cage with a lion inside it; and a put the tents up in the mor- from your life” of the question… I love men.