“The name of the American Leonard Freed, who has died aged 77, became synonymous with that of the ‘concerned photographer’. In the wake of the second world war, photojournalism became increasingly involved with human rights and, in Freed’s case, with civil rights in his homeland. As a documentarist of the situation of African-Americans, he always had an eye for the unexpected and upbeat, often in the grimmest of circumstances.
“He followed the years of struggle against segregation and discrimination by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), photographing Martin Luther King Jr and his great march across the US from Alabama to Washington; equally, his image of children playing around a water hydrant in New York became an icon, along with those of daily life in that city, still effectively segregated by ghettoisation in the 1950s and 60s.”
—Amanda Hopkinson, Guardian, Dec. 6, 2006