We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Laurie Freitag . We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Laurie below.
Hi Laurie, thanks for joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.
I think that I learned to do what I do by simply following my passion. As a child I was awestruck by images that I saw in Look and Life magazines. I felt a ‘calling’ to be a photographer but was steered away from any creative career by my parents who wanted me in a stable job so I spent twenty years working behind the scenes in TV news, a very nice steady paycheck and my parents were very proud of that choice.
When I took a buyout and left TV, I took some time off but ultimately found myself back in random meaningless jobs for the next ten years. It was when I became a nanny that I felt the desire to document take over and I knew that I was on the right path. The family that I was with for thirteen years were very supportive and gave me full access to document the family. I looked at that position as a residency where I was able to follow my heart in whatever direction it took me.
With the ease of documenting using a phone, I stopped using a camera. As the phone technology got better, so did my work. I can’t say that I would do anything differently. I truly believe everything happened as it was supposed to.
Laurie, before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I am a documentary fine-art photographer. I work with an iPhone Pro Max 11 to document my environment. I have focused on documenting the children I have nannied over the past fifteen years and their friends which I call ‘The Lost Years’ (those years that most adults cannot remember before the age of seven-years-old’).
Though my main focus is documenting children at play, I have created a series that happened while with the children in the garden during Covid called ‘In the Garden at Chislehurst’. I have also created another series, quite by accident, as I was getting into my car after a rainstorm in Los Angeles. That series shows leaves on the street and that series is called ‘We are Stardust, we are Golden’.
‘In the Garden at Chislehurst’ and ‘We are Stardust, we are Golden’ are both represented by the Susan Spiritus Gallery.
What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?
The most rewarding aspect of being an artist is the call-and-response to, for lack of a better word, the universe.
There is always something to notice, to contemplate, to respond to. The visual meets the mind. As an artist I relish my alone time so I can connect to the visual, It’s how I make sense of my life, of my past journey. It pulls me in a direction I feel only expands my consciousness.
How can we best help foster a strong, supportive environment for artists and creatives?
I would love to see MORE art on the streets, on billboards, on buildings, on storefronts. I’m not just talking about photography, I’m talking about all art. There are some parts of Los Angeles that are just so fun to visit because of the murals. There’s the bougainvillea heart hanging over the Hollywood Freeway and the Silver Lake heart steps, both created by the same artist-Corinne Carrey.
When I’m on the freeway I see the columns underneath and they look like totem poles. I see a blank canvas just waiting for an artist to design magnificent colorful works all up and down the columns.
I would love L.A. to plant MORE bougainvillea hearts and hang them over the freeways. Why not go ALL out and make the world a visually better place?
Contact Info:
- Website: www.lauriefreitag.com
- Instagram: lauriefreitagphotography
- Other: http://susanspiritusgallery.com/artist/laurie-freitag/
Image Credits
Images by Laurie Freitag