Check Out Laurie Freitag’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Laurie Freitag.

Hi Laurie, thanks for joining us today. We’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Raised surrounded by my Parisian grandparents and aunt, French was spoken in our house but I was excluded from the conversation. I’m sure it had something to do with keeping the conversation private! No wonder I turned to photography. I could have my own conversation!

As a child, I dreamt of owning my own camera and each holiday or birthday, my parents asked me what I wanted. I always asked for a camera and 10 rolls of film. I never got it and I’m sure my parents, who grew up in the depression, just didn’t see the viability of anything creative so they didn’t support that part of me.

I had a polaroid camera as a child but didn’t actually get the camera I wanted until I was 18 when I left home and went traveling across the U.S. with a boyfriend. I bought myself a Nikkormat SLR with as much Tri-X and Kodachrome film I could carry!

Time passed and I succumbed to the pressure from my parents to get a ‘real’ job and I spent the next 20 years working at a local TV station (KHJ-KCAL). Always unfulfilled creatively, I took side jobs as a freelance photographer working at The Hollywood Independent newspaper and L.A. Reader. I bought myself a Besseler enlarger from Alan’s Black & White Lab that closed down in Hollywood. That enlarger took up 1/3 of my kitchen and I had many 2am sessions until I lost interest in spending time with it.

Photography turned to a hobby and it wasn’t until a friend suggested that I apply to the Los Angeles Art Association membership in 2014 that I started to take my work seriously. I got into a few shows at their Gallery 825 on La Cienega Blvd. in L.A. and that really whet my appetite for more but sadly more was not that easy to come by!

I had one image make it into Daniel Miller’s YourDailyPhotograph.com (a daily online international resource for photograph collectors) and I felt like I won the lottery. Little did I realize how slow the journey of having my work seen would be.

I was told to apply to blogs and photography magazines to promote my work but it seemed impossible to get any coverage. I decided to start L.A. Photo Curator, an international online competition that would show ALL work submitted in an online exhibition. I knew there had to be others like myself that were struggling with being seen…and I was right. I added the humanitarian feature of donating 20% of all artist entry fees to charity. I believe the exposure the artists get is invaluable and I feel like I can go anywhere in the world and look up my photo friends.

I continued to push my career forward- entering competitions and trying to place my work in any kind of blog or magazine. I started to interview respected people in the field and posted the interviews on L.A. Photo Curator’s website. I was coming from a very inexperienced place so it was not so easy to approach these people but nonetheless, when I approached Susan Spiritus whose gallery represents many many great photographers – she said yes!

And a few years later, in 2020, she asked to represent my series ‘In the Garden at Chislehurst.’ That was a huge win for me!

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
It’s never a smooth road. It took years for me to feel confident enough to enter the Julia Margaret Cameron Awards for Women. When I finally did this past year, I was thrilled to place first in the Portraits/Series category for my series ‘The Lost Years.’ Part of the win is that the work is printed and shown in a gallery in Barcelona, Spain. Sadly I didn’t have the money to cover the expense of the printing of the work and the travel involved.

Other struggles involve dealing with unscrupulous art establishments, most recently a NFT gallery in Santa Monica that wanted to sell my work from the series, ‘In the Garden at Chislehurst’, for 1/10th of the going price, claiming that they love my work but the market cannot bear what the price of my art sells for normally. These sorts of establishments are preying on artists that desperately want their work to be seen. I encourage artists to dig deeper in the NFT world and find out exactly where their work will be sold once they give their art away.

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
I have two active series, ‘The Lost Years’ (documenting childhood before the age of seven years old which most of us cannot remember) and also the botanicals ‘In the Garden at Chislehurst’.

Working as a nanny over the years with infants and children watching them day to day, I was hit with the realization that these wonderful days filled with giggles and struggle would not be something the child would remember. I became a witness to their stories and took on the role of a documenter. The series, ‘The Lost Years’ was created to document these moments that most adults won’t remember, the age before seven years old.

My work as a nanny in Silver Lake, CA and also as a fine-art photographer photographing children has been influenced by the child-development pioneer Magda Gerber, an early childhood educator who resided in Silver Lake. Gerber is known for teaching parents and caregivers how to understand babies and interact with them respectfully from birth which includes allowing for free movement and uninterrupted play. This is key to my approach to photography. None of the photographs I take are staged. It’s all about capturing the moments. I will never ask a child to ‘pose’ for me.

During the Covid lockdown of 2020, I was lucky to be in a situation where we could be outside in nature in Los Angeles. It was the curiosity of a four-year-old boy that led me into a garden- a world of order, harmony, sunshine and flowers.

As the child played in the dirt pretending to make berry pie, I looked up from my low vantage point and saw dracaenas. I leaned close to the stalks of the tree with my iPhone and entered another world. Those dracaenas became the series ‘In the Garden at Chislehurst’. This work has been my navigation and escapes from the stress of the pandemic.

By finding a beautiful space in the garden, it reminded me, no matter the unfortunate circumstance, that beauty is always here. It raises the question, do we believe, as Einstein said, “Is the universe a friendly place?” I had forgotten that it was.

Contact Info:

• Website: http://www.lauriefreitag.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lauriefreitagphotography
• Other: http://susanspiritusgallery.com/artist/laurie-freitag/