Born in 1939 in Pittsburgh, USA. Died in 2019 in New York, USA.

Freedman worked as a nightclub musician and copywriter before engaging auto didactically with photography and consequently carrying out her first photographic project Old News: Resurrection City (1971). Appalled by the murder of Martin Luther King Jr., Freedman travelled to Washington D.C. and took part in the Poor People’s Campaign, during which she began documenting Resurrection City, a camp of plywood shacks built by demonstrators. Freedman then spent two years traveling with the Beaty-Cole circus and paid tribute to the dying way of life of the circus people with the book Circus Days (1975). Among her most intensive documentaries are Firehouse (1977) and Street Cops (1982), in which Jill Freedman intimately followed the activities of the New York Fire and Police Departments at one of New York’s most corrupt times.

Freedman freelanced for magazines such as Life, Time, Geo and New York Times Magazine and whose photographs are reminiscent of the works by André Kertész, Dorothea Lange and Cartier-Bresson, has a sharp sense of humour as well as a sense of composition and mood.
Freedman seems to be drawn to the bizarre, the unexpected and the inexplicable – the loneliness of the individual, the spookiness of the circus and the everyday mystery of the streets. It is often difficult to determine whether she means her photographs to be haunting or hilarious, crude or cheerful.

Freedman’s works are represented in international collections such as Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; International Center of Photography, New York, USA; George Eastman House, Rochester, USA; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D. C., USA; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, USA; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris, France.