Made in Germany

Leonard Freed was born in 1929. He was a noted American photojournalist and member of Magnum Photos. During his life Freed produced thirteen books and dozens of photo essays. His photographs are owned by the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum Folkwang, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Recent Freed projects include a reprinting of his classic Black in White America and the publication of his posthumous book This Is the Day: The March on Washington. He died in 2006.

The American photographer Leonard Freed travelled to Germany for the first time in 1954. Curious and yet from a safe distance, he observed the people in their social surroundings, at work, at street festivals, in public parks, in the streetsand against the industrial backdrop of the Ruhr Valley. The Germany he saw was deeply cursed with the effects of war and the NS regime despite the country s reconstruction, industrial development and economic success. Freed published his extensive report Made in Germany for the first time with Grossman Publishers in New York in 1970. The present reprint accompanies the same-named exhibition at Museum Folkwang in Essen and comes with a booklet providing extra information about Freed s approach and his times. The booklet also contains hitherto unpublished images, documents, and writing by Freed, spanning his fifty years of photographing Germany.