Magnum Editions: Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Baltimore, USA, 1964

Leonard Freed was “never interested in photographing celebrities; I was interested in people. Take the Martin Luther King Photo. He is an icon, people want to touch him, he is not a human being anymore, he is totally surrounded by the arms, he is protected. Look at the eyes. I was more interested in the people, in their hands, than I was in Martin Luther King himself.” Freed’s picture of Dr King shows him being greeted on his return to the U.S. after receiving the Nobel Peace Prize, mobbed by the public as he travelled through Baltimore in a motorcade. The photographer documented the civil rights movement extensively and was a pioneer of socially conscious photography.