Art and the Individual

October 01, 2011 — Andy Freeberg’s work been described as witty, incisive, luminous and humanistic, and his photographs have been exhibited around the world and acquired by major museums and collectors. He recently emerged on the contemporary art photography scene with three photo series, each recording the interaction, or lack thereof, between the individual and works of art.

Freeberg’s first fine art series was Sentry (see pg. 52), created in 2006. While walking around the Chelsea area of Manhattan, he noticed the big, white desks at the entrance to art galleries and found it amusing that he could only see the top of the receptionist’s head. When he took a photo in the first gallery, the receptionist never looked up, and he went on to take a couple more photos of receptionists at their desks in other galleries. A photo editor friend thought the work was unique and suggested he shoot some more gallery images to prepare for possibly getting a show of the work.

The first solo show of the Sentry project opened in 2007 at the Danziger Projects Gallery in Chelsea, to a favorable review in The New York Times. Vince Aletti of The New Yorker wrote, “In a sense, Freeberg is taking scalps, but his real targets are uniformity, anonymity and their chilling effect.”

Guardian Series
In the 1980s, Freeberg photographed in St. Petersburg, Russia when it was still called Leningrad. He returned in 2008, hoping to do a “before and after” series including the black and white photos he had taken on his previous trip. But he was having a difficult time making it work.
Then he visited the Hermitage Museum. He noticed that the security guards in the galleries were middle-aged and elderly women who, instead of wearing uniforms, were dressed in their own colorful clothes. The women seemed to complement the paintings. Says Freeberg, “They loved their work. It was as though they were protecting the history of their country.” Realizing this could be his next project, he took a few shots in the available light.

Later that year, he took some of his Hermitage Museum prints to Fotofest in Houston, TX, where he met Evgeny Berezner from the Russian Ministry of Culture. After seeing Freeberg’s prints, Berezner invited the photographer to come back to Russia and shoot at other museums in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Freeberg returned with a tripod and a new camera, and began photographing with a museum employee and interpreter in tow. This time he occasionally asked his subjects (the “guardians”) to move to another chair to make the paring of the painting and the woman a better picture. Guardians was born.

In 2009, after winning a Critical Mass book award from Photolucida to have his photographs published, Freeberg made a third trip to St. Petersburg to finish the project. Clifford Levey, then the Moscow bureau chief for The New York Times, was taken with the series and lent him his staff interpreter, Nikolai Khalip (son of famous Soviet photographer Yakov Khalip), who helped him interview some of the women that Levy later quoted in the introduction to Freeberg’s published book, Guardians. In 2010 Guardians won a Communications Arts Photo Award.
 
Art Fare Series
Photographs of art dealers and their clients at major art fairs such as The Armory Show in New York and Art Basel in Switzerland and Miami make up Freeberg’s most recent series, Art Fare. The photographs, which he says are almost all candid, capture the dealers working on their laptops and iPads or talking on cell phones, seemingly oblivious to the hordes of art shoppers that attend these fairs. “The lighting and art in the booths, combined with the clothing styles and electronic devices gives the pictures a feel of living dioramas or stage sets, where the art world plays itself,” Freeberg says.

Early life
Andy Freeberg grew up in New Rochelle, NY. He inherited his grandfather’s Exakta camera and started taking pictures at a young age. His younger brother taught him to develop film in the darkroom that his dad, an avid amateur photographer, built in the basement of their home. He also learned about photography by reading books and magazines, and by trial and error. Early on he was inspired by Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Magnum agency photographers and later by Mary Ellen Mark, Cindy Sherman, Larry Fink and Sally Mann.

While attending the University of Michigan he took art history courses and became a staff photographer for the student newspaper, eventually becoming the photo editor. “It was amazing training,” Freeberg says, “having to shoot, process and print immediately after you took the photos, then having your picture printed in the paper the next morning for all to see. The school had a great jazz concert organization–I got to shoot all the shows I wanted.”

He joined forces with a fellow photographer to become house photographers at Pine Knob, an outdoor summer theater north of Detroit that presented all the big touring bands of the day. They talked their way into being staff photographers for the Montreux Jazz Festival in Switzerland, meeting and photographing the jazz greats of the time.

After his junior year of college, Freeberg moved to New York City and got an internship at the Village Voice and a part time job in the Rolling Stone darkroom. Both gave him regular shooting assignments, and he soon began doing portrait and photojournalistic assignments for Fortune, Time, Sports Illustrated and Businessweek.

San Francisco and Fotofest
In 1990, he moved to San Francisco to photograph for an adventure travel company’s catalog. The work took him all over the world: Africa, Asia, South America. He continued to do assignments for U.S. and German magazines, photographing, for example, the dot com boom in Silicon Valley.

In 2004, he took a portfolio of his work for review at Fotofest in Houston, an experience he says was eye opening. He saw the contemporary work on display and felt his traditional style and subject matter would not make an impact. He went home, bought a full frame digital camera, the Canon 5D, and began experimenting with color photography on some personal projects. A couple of years later, Sentry was born. After a successful photojournalism career, Andy had found a unique way to make an impression.

First Cameras and Digital Photography
Over the years, Freeberg has worked with an assortment of cameras—a Nikkormat FM, Leica M5’s, a Widelux 35mm, a Linhof Technorama 617, Hasselblads, Fuji  GX680 6 x 8, Canon EOS 5D and 5D Mark II. He rarely shoots film anymore, though he resisted switching to digital at first. “But now I feel that digital opens up many subjects that could not have been shot with film because of how a digital SLR camera works in low and mixed light situations, particularly in the case of my three recent fine art series,” he says. “Being able to shoot handheld with a 35mm and get the quality of almost a medium format camera is really freeing to me.”

Printers, Paper and Aftercapture
Freeberg no longer uses a darkroom for his prints. Several years ago, two gallery owner friends that specialize in vintage black-and-white prints were insisting that he provide them with gelatin silver prints. He did a test inkjet black-and-white print on his Epson 4800 to match a silver print done by a master darkroom printer in San Francisco. The gallery owners couldn’t tell the difference, and one even picked the digital print as the silver one. Freeberg was sold on inkjet printing.

He still uses an Epson 4800 printer. When he requires larger prints—30 x 45 and 40 x 60 inches—he uses the services of a nearby print studio with an Epson 11800. He prefers matte papers using Enhanced Matte, Moab’s Lasal, Hahnemuhle and Ultra Smooth Fine Art for black-and-white prints.

Freeberg processes RAW images in Photoshop using Adobe Bridge. He’s been told by his techie friends that he should be using Lightroom but says, “I’m always a little behind the curve and Bridge works fine for me. My monitor is color calibrated. I work with final prints in Adobe RGB (1998) and Photoshop.”

Always a new Challenge
“I’ve been at this over 30 years and it doesn’t seem to get any easier,” he says. “With the arrival of digital photography it’s now simple for anyone to make a technically quality image. When I started out, half the battle was making sure you got the film to come out correctly. Needing technical ability, the cost of film and processing set the bar high for anyone trying to break into the business. So now, even more, you have to distinguish yourself from everyone else by having a distinct style or filling a niche. You have to be single-minded in this pursuit, have a thick skin and be able to take rejection on a regular basis—be an entrepreneur, a salesperson, a promoter, a technician, good with finances and, above all, have a keen eye. If you’re lacking in any of those skills you better have a day job to pay someone else to do that for you. Simple solution, marry rich. I always do things the hard way.”

Over the next few years Freeberg would like to have a few more of his current fine art projects completed. His photographs have appeared in numerous publications and exhibitions, and are in private and public collections, including the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston and Boston and in the George Eastman House Museum of Photography. He is represented by the Paul Kopeikin Gallery in L.A. and the Clark Gallery in Boston.
See his fine art portfolios and more information by visiting his Web site at www.andyfreeberg.com.

Ingredients
Sentry
Canon EOS 5D
17-35mm zoom
ISO 400 to 800

Guardians
Canon EOS 5D
24-70mm zoom lens
ISO 400 to 800

Art Fare
Canon 5D Mark II
24-70mm zoom lens in the available light