Having a Worldview

by Michelle Nott

published in Brussels Weekly, February 17, 2011

When people ask me what I miss about America, the answer is easy. New York City. Which is why the

publicity poster for the latest temporary exhibit at Le Musée de la Photographie in Charleroi caught my

attention and prompted me to go.

The black and white scene of men in gray-toned suits and one wide-striped tie seduced me with its

1950s Wall Street style. Leonard Freed is the photographer. The exhibit is “Worldview” and runs until

May 2011. Don’t miss it.

Leonard Freed's view of the world started, indeed, in New York City. The year was 1929. Born of

Russian descent into an Hasidic Jewish family, Freed wanted to explore his origins and that is where

this exhibit starts.

The first photographs clearly place the viewer below the skyscrapers. Jewish children and teachers look

out from their schools, from their lives. Freed catches their regard so that they catch ours. Voyeurs

through his lens, we can sense the emotion that provoked the shot, the angle, the moment that left in a

flash.

Still in the 1950s, Freed's worldview expands to Belgium via Germany where he was working. He

witnesses the mining catastrophe of Marcinelle (1956) near Charleroi, a shocking event in Belgium's

memory. From a discreet distance, his photographs frame the mourning of the widows and of the

children. Two-hundred fifty coffins line the streets. A woman prays at an open window. Families weep.

Freed captures the experience as emotion rather than as a news report. He never did considere himself a

photojournalist.
Back in New York City in the 1960s, he uses his lens to discover where people come from, where they

are now, and where they may go. He catches festive moments at office parties with white men and

women dancing holding cocktails. Their smiles are so wide I can almost hear the music in the

background. Down on the streets, Harlem’s children play as fire hydrants wash the heat and troubles

away for a cool moment. Other young boys are acting tough while men are handcuffed in the backseat

of squad cars. A year later, Martin Luther King, Jr. drives by after winning the Nobel Peace Prize. By

the late 1970s, a woman police officer plays what looks like “Duck, Duck, Goose”, with a group of

children on a Harlem street.

With his photos he looked within and around himself in search of who he was by where he was. He

believed the subject of his pictures was always him.

Freed’s camera caught history without trying to report on it. He took pictures of what he saw, what

anyone could have seen. However, his talent allows him to immortalize the emotion in the moment, the

life being expressed in the blink of an eye.

I love New York City and would go back in an instance for a walk through Central Park, down through

Soho or over to Brooklyn. I know its strengths and weaknesses. That energy for which its streets are so

famous is the breath of life in the Worldview exhibit. A breath that blew Leonard Freed around the

world, and brings his photos back again.

More information

Besides the Leonard Freed exhibit, two other temporary exhibits are also worth the visit: Simon Lueck,

the Once and the Future Queens and Fernand Dumeunier, Le Visage et L'Esprit.

Since the mines closed in the second half of the last century, Charleroi is not much to see. However, the

Belgian government has given money to the surrounding region and most notably to its photography

museum. The collection makes it one of the most important photography museums in Europe.
Le Musée de la Photographie

Avenue Paul Pastur 11 (GPS Place des Essarts)

6032 Charelroi (Mont-Sur-Marchienne), Belgium

32 (0) 71/43 58 10

info@museephoto.be

Open Tuesday through Sunday 10am – 6pm

Admission fees include permanent collection and exhibits:

6 euros for general, 4 euros for seniors and groups, 3 euros for students and the unemployed.

Free for children under 12.

Free the first Sunday of each month.

Light snacks and drinks are available in the museum café.