Eli Reed

The definitive collection of Leonard Freed's seminal and timely 1968 civil rights photo-essay, in a fresh and expanded editionIn 1962, white American photojournalist Leonard Freed was on assignment in Berlin. He photographed an African American soldier standing in front of the wall. The irony of this soldier defending the US on foreign soil while African Americans at home were fighting for their civil rights resonated with Freed. On his return to the States in 1963 he photographed the march on Washington and began a journey across the United States to document the anxiety and tension within Black communities in the North and South. From 1963 to 1965, he captured the plight of African Americans and the great struggle for racial equality within a deeply segregated, racist society.This extraordinary collection of images--from Martin Luther King, Jr. greeting an eager crowd in an open-topped car to incarcerated Black men in the Deep South and families living defiantly ordinary lives--conveys with power and dignity the exhausting, endless struggle of being Black in white America.The photographs in this new edition have been reproduced from the original negatives and using vintage prints created by Freed's master printer and widow, Brigitte Freed, as reference. Freed's Black in White America series has never been published in such quality and detail before, and many images are being published for the first time. The photographs are accompanied by text from Freed's original diaries from the time. It is published in close collaboration with the Freed Estate and features a foreword from fellow Magnum photographer Eli Reed.Leonard Freed (1929-2006) was an acclaimed American documentary photojournalist and member of Magnum Photos. Born and raised in working-class Brooklyn, Freed rose to prominence for his portrayal of societal and racial injustices, particularly in relation to the Black community during the American civil rights movement in the 1960s. He is also renowned for his photo-essays on the Jewish community in Amsterdam and Germany, the Yom Kippur War, Asian immigration in England, North Sea oil development, Spain after Franco and the New York police department in the 1970s, among others.

Award-winning documentary photographer Eli Reed’s “long walk” has been a journey that has taken him from a low-income housing project in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, to Harvard University and to membership in the elite international photojournalists’ collective, Magnum Photos. Reed’s quest to understand “what it means to be a human being” has given him an extraordinary empathy with the people he photographs, whether they are Lost Boys in Sudan, the poor in America, or actors in Hollywood. In a photographic career spanning five decades, Reed has been the recipient of a World Understanding Award from POYi (Pictures of the Year International), Lucie Award for Achievement in Documentary, World Press Award, Leica Medal of Excellence, Overseas Press Club Award, and a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard, as well as a runner-up for a Pulitzer Prize.Eli Reed: A Long Walk Home presents the first career retrospective of Reed’s work. Consisting of over 250 images that span the full range of his subjects and his evolution as a photographer, the photographs are a visual summation of the human condition. They include examples of Reed’s early work; a broad selection of images of people from New York to California that constitutes a brilliant collective portrait of the social, cultural, and economic experiences of Americans in our time; images of life and conflict in Africa, the Middle East, Haiti, Central America, England, Spain, South America, and China; portraits of women and Hollywood actors; and self-portraits. Reed’s artist statement and an introduction by Paul Theroux, whom Reed met while working in Africa, complete the volume.

Could there be anything more unique than an alien being's point of view? Magnum Photos photographer Eli Reed wonders about this. If such a benevolent being mingled among us, invisibly or at least unnoticed, observing the fine points of the human condition, what might it take notice of? In his introduction, Reed suggests that the photographs in Fair Witness could be an approximation of such a being's vision. The photographs are of sublime moments, some funny, some ironic, some goofy, some unsettling, most so fleeting as to be immediately lost to time if not photographed. These moments that elude the consciousness of most human beings might significantly inform an alien visitor. Of course, our alien is just an exercise in imagination and an unexpected way of framing the rare, refreshing vision found in the photographs of Fair Witness. Not coincidentally, this title was inspired by the 1961 science fiction novel Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. The classic black and white photographs in Fair Witness were taken by the earthling David Lykes Keenan between 2004 and 2012.