Behind the Image: Leonard Freed’s Police Work

The two images by Leonard Freed featured here are now available as part of the Magnum Editions collection, a series of 8×10″ archival pigment prints in limited editions of 100 each.

Between 1972–1979, Leonard Freed accompanied New York City police officers on their day shifts, night shifts, homicide calls, drug busts in “shooting galleries,” into dilapidated tenement buildings, and down dismal prison halls. At a time when the city faced rampant crime and was on the brink of bankruptcy, the Brooklyn native sought to investigate the blue-collar workers at the center of public distrust. The previous year, detective and whistleblower Frank Serpico had revealed widespread corruption in the NYPD.

Shop these limited-edition prints and explore more Magnum Editions prints here. 

“The series of police stories started with demonstrations outside my building in New York during the Vietnam War. It was about 1972 and the building was full of radicals, and they were calling the police ‘Pigs’ all the time. But the policeman is just a working man: they’re not college graduates, or psychiatrists, judges or social workers,” Freed wrote in Magnum Stories. “What I saw were average people doing a sometimes boring, sometimes corrupting, sometimes dangerous and ugly and unhealthy job,” he adds in his acclaimed book, Police Work.

The book’s cover image frames the detail of an off-duty officer’s ankle before he goes to the gym, offering a visceral dose of his daily reality: the weight of the gun against the skin, the body attuned to danger, no visible badge of authority but a frayed shoelace. These are, in Freed’s eyes, people who, “usually to improve their lot, have taken a job which may well require them to kill someone.”

Another policeman — who confessed he worried about his family when working the night shift — points his gun into a stairwell’s black void. Also available as a limited-edition print, the image’s slightly blurred contours heightens the moment’s suspense, as the nature of duty meets hesitation, fear, and vigilance.

Freed challenges romanticized notions of cops heroically tackling the urban underbelly, or the contrary — of crooked, baton-wielding browbeaters. “I hope to make people think about who the police are…and why we need them,” Freed wrote in Police Work. 

Although Police Work is an in-depth series, Freed was mindful of the impact of a single image. “I want a photograph you can take out of context and put on your wall to read like a poem,” he wrote.

Shop these limited-edition 8×10 prints and explore more Magnum Editions prints here. 

Leonard Freed’s book Police Work is available here.