NICK FREEMAN
​​​Photography

About Me

I have been photographing for 25 years now, mostly in the neighborhood of Hampden in Baltimore. Beginning in high school, I noticed changes within the neighborhood and took to documenting them. I attended St. Mary’s College of Maryland for two years before transferring to New York University to focus solely on photography.

After graduating from NYU, I moved back to Baltimore and was published in 25 Under 25: Up and Coming American Photographers for an essay on Hampden. I spent years working in construction, in restaurant service, and as a stagehand. Throughout this time, I travelled through Europe, went on plenty of road trips, moved to New Orleans, and then back to Baltimore. After a music tour, then almost moving to Nashville, I spent the pandemic locked up with a new family.

I’m not going to say what my work is supposed to represent. I always believed that the work should be able to exist without context and words. I have taken the most inspiration from Robert Frank, Eugene Atget, William Eggleston, and my mentor in college, Philip Perkis. So much of this work deals with an exploration and curiosity of public space. You know where and when you are, but they can speak throughout time. Philip Perkis once wrote, “Art lives in the tension between abstraction <-> -<->-<-> description.” Every time I make a photograph, I hope to achieve this equality. To me, every shot is special in that it is 1 of 36, as I still shoot film.

I am in the middle of cataloging over 20,000 images that have never been digitzed. Garry Winogrand died with 2500 rolls of film left never processed. I only have 1500 rolls that I am in the process of scanning.