Artup: Don Freeman: Memory Between the Frames

Don Freeman Finds Memory Between the Frames at Art Up

by Robert Brune

An overcast sky softened the autumn colors splashing across the mountains surrounding Margaretville Friday evening, while unusually mild October air invited people to linger along Main Street. Inside Art Up, that same sense of nature transformed by atmosphere continued across the gallery walls as photographer and filmmaker Don Freeman welcomed visitors to the opening reception for his solo exhibition.

A steady audience moved through the gallery as the mild evening continued outside, encountering Freeman’s black-and-white photographs of classical statuary, landscapes, weathered driftwood and natural forms. Nearby, layered photographic images printed onto fabric introduced another dimension to a body of work rooted almost entirely in 35mm black-and-white film. “They’re all 35 millimeter,” Freeman said while walking through the exhibition, explaining that the variations come afterward through printing and post-production. A warm sepia tone changes the character of photographs made in the gardens at Versailles, while another work combines botanical imagery and separate photographs digitally before being printed onto fabric, producing an almost three-dimensional effect.

Freeman has spent nearly 30 years experimenting with photography while remaining committed to film. His processes have included diazo blueprints, silkscreen on painted surfaces, silver gelatin prints and darkroom toning used to introduce color and texture. Nature, still lifes and objects found in museum collections have repeatedly provided his subjects. Yet what initially appears to be an exploration of photographic process gradually reveals something considerably more personal. Across Freeman’s work, places and objects become containers for memory, sometimes carrying experiences separated from the finished photograph by decades.

That connection becomes particularly apparent in a series rooted in Freeman’s childhood on Bainbridge Island in Washington state. Unlike the broad sandy beaches familiar along the East Coast, Freeman remembered beaches covered with rocks and driftwood, places where he played as a child with his mother and brothers. He returned to those beaches following his mother’s death. “I wanted to do a series that was kind of somber and reflected that time when I would go and be on the beach with her and my brothers,” Freeman said. The photographs do not attempt to recreate those childhood experiences literally. Instead, weathered wood, shoreline and texture become fragments through which Freeman approaches something that can no longer be photographed directly. The landscape remains, while the people and moments associated with it survive through memory.

That relationship between an image and the passage of time extends into Freeman’s filmmaking, particularly his latest project, “Tires Velvet Paws,” a black-and-white Super 8 film that took more than 30 years to complete. Freeman began shooting the project in Paris around 1990, inspired by André Breton’s 1928 Surrealist novel “Nadja.” He initially approached the film with the optimism and fascination of a young artist encountering Paris and photographing a woman he viewed as a muse. Then the unfinished footage went onto a shelf. “I didn’t know how to write the film. I didn’t know how to edit it,” Freeman said.

The intervening decades changed that. Freeman learned editing while working on other projects, including his 2015 documentary “Art House,” while additional information emerged about the real woman associated with Breton’s Nadja, Léona-Camille-Ghislaine Delcourt. When Freeman eventually returned to approximately five hours of old Super 8 footage, he was no longer simply looking at the young woman who had fascinated him decades earlier. He was watching his younger self looking at her. “I didn’t realize that when I would look at the footage 30 years later that I was looking at myself looking at them,” Freeman said. “So I decided that the film was as much about me as it was about her.”

That realization became an artistic turning point as Freeman began reconsidering the idea of the woman as muse, along with the way women associated with Surrealism could become transformed into artistic symbols while their individual identities receded behind the artists depicting them. Freeman described his own realization simply: “I am art.” The completed film moves beyond Freeman’s original footage and imagines Nadja later in life, returning to Paris and reclaiming an identity beyond that of muse. For Freeman, finishing the project also meant confronting the difference between the young photographer who began it and the artist who returned to those images decades later.

Despite moving between still photography and filmmaking, Freeman sees little separation between the two. He remains interested in natural light and, particularly, the physical character of film grain. The grain of Super 8 reminded him of what has kept him committed to 35mm photography throughout decades of technological change. “The film is the closest thing to my work that you’re gonna get,” Freeman said. “It’s like a moving version of my work.” Seen together at Art Up, Freeman’s photographs suggest why. Whether looking at a statue in Versailles, driftwood on a childhood beach or footage made by his younger self in Paris, Freeman’s camera does more than preserve what stood before it. Sometimes an image waits years for the artist to discover what else it remembered.