I look down the bar and I think, Oh, wow, that’s her!
This is at the Lion’s Head, a Greenwich Village joint best known as a bar for drinkers with writing problems. There are plenty of them around on this night, but the woman I’m staring at is a photographer, and she’s just published a kick-ass book called Street Cops, and the best way to describe it is to say that she went out and lived it with New York’s Finest.
You look at Jill Freedman’s photos and you feel as if you’re there, and if there’s something better you can say about a photographer’s work, I’d like to know what it is.
So I go over and introduce myself, a rookie reporter with the New York Post, and I’m like a groupie. All I can do is gush about her work.
Which beats the hell out of my work. My beat (if you can call it that) is the Wingo contest, and the pictures that go with my stories show smiling New Yorkers holding up their winning game cards. Nothing that’ll ever hang in a museum.
But check out the cover photo on Street Cops.
Two lawmen, belly to belly. The cop on the left has his hand on his gun, because something’s about to happen in that narrow hallway, something dangerous, but not dangerous enough for the guy on the right to put down his cigar. Because after all, why waste a good cigar if this ends without violence?
Come on. How New York can you get? It’s not just a photograph. It’s a short story. And this book is full of them.
Anyway, we talk for an hour or so, and Jill is funny and gracious, with twinkling eyes and an elfin smile. We leave the Lion’s Head at the same time. A gentle snow is falling, landing just so on her wool cap.
We shake hands and exchange a brief hug on Sheridan Square. She goes her way and I go mine.
That’s nearly forty years ago. I never saw her again, but that night came alive in my mind today with the sad news that Jill Freedman is dead at 79.
And what I remember most from that special night is watching her go - the snowflakes on her cap, her shoulders hunched against the cold, and her footprints on that sidewalk, the whispery kind you make when the snow has just started to stick. A totally New York image, a story in black and white. Kind of like one of her photographs.
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