Leonard Freed. Io amo l’Italia

 His was not a "canonical" interest: although he was a lover of art, landscapes, monuments and ruins, what most fascinated him was "Italian spirit", which he pursued with his camera from Little Italy, with street vendors, children's games and typical marriages, to the everyday life of his beloved Naples and Rome. The one hundred black and white prints - shown here for the first time – are carefully selected among the thousands of negatives that Freed took while travelling the peninsula until 2006 - the year of his death – and give a poetical account of the social, cultural and psychological features of the Italians.
Biography
Born in Brooklyn, New York, to working-class Jewish parents of Eastern European descent, Leonard Freed first wanted to become a painter. However, he began taking photographs while in the Netherlands in 1953, and discovered that this was where his passion lay. In 1954, after trips through Europe and North Africa, he returned to the United States and studied in Alexei Brodovitch's 'design laboratory'. He moved to Amsterdam in 1956 and photographed the Jewish community there. He pursued this concern in numerous books and films, examining German society and his own Jewish roots; his book on the Jews in Germany was published in 1961, and Made in Germany, about post-war Germany, appeared in 1963. Working as a freelance photographer from 1961 onwards, Freed began to travel widely, photographing blacks in America (1963-65), events in Israel (1962-2006), the Yom Kippur War in 1973, and the New York City police department (1972-79). He also shot four films for Japanese, Dutch and Belgian television.
Early in Freed's career, Edward Steichen, then Director of Photography at the Museum of Modern Art, bought three of his photographs for the museum. Steichen told Freed that he was one of the three best young photographers he had seen and urged him to remain an amateur, as the other two were now doing commercial photography and their work had become uninteresting. 'Preferably,' he advised, 'be a truck driver.'
Freed joined Magnum in 1970 and became a full member in 1972. His coverage of the American civil rights movement first made him famous, but he also produced major essays on Poland, Asian immigration in England, North Sea oil development, and Spain after Franco. Photography became Freed's means of exploring societal violence and racial discrimination.
Leonard Freed died in Garrison, New York, on 30 November 2006.