Carole Glauber/Laurie Freitag Interview
August, 2026
 
Carole Glauber: Congratulations on your 50th year of photography. Your announcement made me realize this is my 50th year, too. I am not only behind the camera, but I have also taught History of Photography, published articles in this field, and written a book on an early woman photographer. We all have photographers who have influenced us, but I think it is important for women to look through the lens, so to speak, of women's photographic history.
 
Laurie, I love the diversity of your photographic work-that you are interested in many ideas and ways of expression. You take everything to high levels of accomplishment. First, tell us about your childhood. What were you like as a child?
 
Laurie Freitag: Thank you, Carole, and congratulations to you too on this wonderful 50-year milestone! I can’t help but smile at the timing. You, Susan Spiritus, and I are all celebrating fifty years at almost the same moment. That’s a pretty remarkable coincidence.
 
My own journey into photography began long before I ever picked up a camera.
 
I grew up in New York in a two-family house. My uncle lived upstairs with his wife and four children, and he worked for GAF, a company similar to Kodak. He always seemed to have a camera or movie camera in his hands, not because he was documenting special occasions, but because he was photographing life as it unfolded. Seeing those home movies was magical to me. They made time stand still in a way nothing else could.
 
Ironically, I don’t remember ever seeing the slides or photographs he made until recently, when I discovered a box of slides he had taken more than sixty years ago. In one photograph I’m wearing colorful paper ribbons around my head, neck, and wrists. A cousin suggested it may have been from a May Day celebration. I have absolutely no memory of that day, yet there it was—preserved on film. 
 
I was also the oldest of six children growing up together. My four cousins lived upstairs, and I had a younger sister. I spent a great deal of time simply watching them. I was fascinated by the way children moved through the world, and I could sit for long stretches just observing what they might do next. There are photographs of me as a little girl with my chin resting in my hand, completely absorbed in watching them.
 
I was an observer long before I became a photographer. In elementary school, my fascination with watching people actually got me into trouble more than once. I would become so absorbed in observing a classmate that they thought I was staring. On more than one occasion, the situation escalated to the point where the teacher had to intervene, everyone was sent to the principal’s office, and my mother was called to school. I wasn’t trying to make anyone uncomfortable—I was simply captivated by people. Looking back, I realize I was learning to observe long before I ever held a camera.
 
One of my earliest memories of making something visual goes back to kindergarten. The teacher would hang everyone’s artwork around the classroom, but I wasn’t interested in drawing recognizable pictures. Instead, I would hold several crayons tightly in my hand and repeatedly pound them onto the paper, creating fields of colored marks. I made them over and over again because I was fascinated by the process and by the colors that emerged.
 
I have no idea why I was drawn to that at five years old, but it’s interesting to me that, sixty-five years later, I find myself exploring something surprisingly similar in my Lunar Fields series. The work is completely abstract rather than representational, and the process is now digital instead of crayons on paper. Yet both are rooted in the same curiosity—building an image through color, repetition, and accumulated marks, and discovering what emerges rather than beginning with a predetermined picture. I never would have connected those two moments until I looked back on them side by side.
 
Like most children growing up in New York in the 1960s, I went on countless school trips to the city’s museums. I was surrounded by extraordinary art, but I can’t honestly say I was interested in it at the time. Perhaps those visits influenced me in ways I didn’t recognize, but they weren’t what sparked my creativity.
 
Carole Glauber: Were the arts a part of your family?
 
Laurie Freitag: Yes, although not in the way people might expect. Music was probably the strongest artistic influence in our family. I took piano lessons, my younger sister and I were always singing together, and I loved to dance. One of my uncles played boogie-woogie piano, and music was something I was immersed in throughout my childhood.
 
The visual arts weren’t really part of our everyday lives. I don’t remember anyone painting or talking about art. The exception was my uncle upstairs, who always had a camera or movie camera with him, quietly photographing everyday life.
 
We didn’t have much money, so creativity often meant making something from whatever we had. We made flowers from tissue paper and built things by hand. I never thought of any of it as making art. I simply had a burning desire to create.
 
What did capture my imagination were magazines. Life and Look, along with the inexpensive women’s and general-interest magazines that were everywhere in those days, became my visual playground. Between the ages of 10-14 my parents let me cover one entire wall of my bedroom—from floor to ceiling—with photographs, headlines, and words that I cut out. I could spend hours arranging and rearranging them, discovering how one image changed the feeling of another. It was something I could live with every day and return to whenever I wanted.
 
Looking back, I think that wall may have been one of the most important influences on my visual development. People have often commented on the composition of my photographs, and for years I couldn’t explain where that instinct came from. I now wonder if it began there—living with hundreds of images every day, constantly moving them around, seeing how balance, rhythm, shape, and placement affected one another. I wasn’t studying composition in any formal sense. I was simply training my eye without realizing it.
 
Carole Glauber: How did you become interested in photography? What were your first cameras? Did you attend art or photography school or take classes?
 
Laurie Freitag: As I mentioned earlier, I think my interest in photography began with my uncle. He always seemed to have a camera or movie camera in his hands, quietly photographing everyday life. Looking back, I don’t remember anyone else photographing us. He made photography seem like a natural part of life rather than something reserved for special occasions.
 
From the time I was about ten years old, I wanted a camera. Watching my uncle photograph everyday life had made a lasting impression on me. Every birthday and every Hanukkah, I asked for the same thing: a camera and ten rolls of film. It became almost a family tradition because that was all I ever wanted.
 
We didn’t have a lot of money, and my parents hoped I would choose a more practical career than becoming an artist, so a camera never appeared. Finally, when I was eighteen, I bought my first camera myself-a Nikkormat. Shortly afterward, I purchased a Nikon FM. Owning those cameras changed everything. They gave me the opportunity to finally express the way I had been observing the world for years.
 
I didn’t attend art school or photography school, but I was fortunate to learn from photographers along the way. One of the biggest influences was my friend Norm Strassner, who was five or six years older than I was and already an experienced photographer. We spent five months traveling across the United States, living out of a van, and he taught me a lot about photography. 
 
During that trip, we stayed for several weeks with one of Norm’s high school friends, who taught darkroom printing at Stony Brook University on Long Island. He welcomed me into his home darkroom and taught me the craft of black-and-white printing. Watching an image slowly emerge in the developer tray was unlike anything I had experienced before and deepened my fascination with photography
 
Later, I continued learning through workshops and photographic trips. One of the photographers who had a lasting influence on me was commercial photographer Steve Ramsey. While we were photographing in Kauai, he taught me how to really see light. That lesson has stayed with me throughout my career.
 
About six years ago, photographer Ellen Friedlander offered another kind of guidance while I was refining The Lost Years. The concept and series were already established, but she encouraged me to think more critically about visual consistency and the thread that connects images into a cohesive body of work. That perspective helped strengthen the series.
 
My education wasn’t built in a classroom. It came through generous mentors, travel, experimentation, countless hours making photographs, and fifty years of continuing to learn.
 
Carole Glauber: How do you decide what to photograph?
 
Laurie Freitag: I don’t usually begin with an idea. Something catches my attention, and I keep coming back to it. Often I don’t even know why at first. I’ve learned not to question that instinct. If something continues to pull me in, I know it’s worth exploring.
 
When I look back, almost every major body of work has begun that way. The Lost Years grew out of the sixteen years I spent working as a nanny. Years after photographing along the L.A. River, I returned to those images and discovered an entirely new direction. They eventually became Lunar Fields through digital double exposure and painting. More recently, a technical mishap with my iPhone led me to begin City in the Clouds. None of those projects were planned from the beginning.
 
I’ve realized that my best work usually begins with curiosity rather than certainty. I rarely set out to make a particular body of work. Instead, I pay attention to what continues to hold my interest and let the work reveal itself over time.
 
Carole Glauber: What women photographers from our past have influenced your work and your way of thinking and seeing?
 
Laurie Freitag: This may be the one question where my answer is different from what people might expect.
 
I never formally studied the history of photography, and I wasn’t inspired by museums or by following the work of particular photographers—male or female. My education came from making photographs, observing the world, and learning from the people I encountered along the way.
 
Only much later did I begin learning about photographers like Helen Levitt. I discovered Helen Levitt only a few years ago, so I can’t honestly say she influenced my early work. Instead, I feel a kinship with the way she quietly observed everyday life, especially children.
 
What’s been interesting is realizing that some of the ideas I arrived at intuitively have connections to earlier photographic traditions. Much of my recent work has moved away from the straight photograph and toward images that are emotional, psychological, and transformed through process. I didn’t arrive there by studying the Pictorialists, but I can appreciate the parallels now that I understand more about their work.
 
Since founding L.A. Photo Curator in 2015, I’ve had the privilege of seeing work of photographers from around the world through our international exhibitions and competitions. I’m sure that kind of exposure broadens my visual vocabulary in ways I don’t even recognize. At the same time, I’ve learned to trust my own instincts and follow my own path.
 
Looking back over fifty years, I don’t think my work was shaped by particular photographers as much as it was by curiosity, observation, and life itself. I didn’t study photography formally or set out to follow an established tradition. I learned by looking closely, responding instinctively, and making photographs over time. 
 
Carole Glauber:  When I think about women in our histories during the years of 1880-1920 for example, they encountered changes in photographic technology such as the transition from dry-plate negatives with large cumbersome cameras, to film and hand-held cameras, to cameras that would fit in their purse. I see parallels with our adaptations during the past 50 years from black and white film with darkroom processing, to digital cameras and computers, to the current use of our phones as cameras and photo processors. How has this transition impacted your photographic work?
 
Laurie Freitag: The transition in technology has changed my work enormously. I began with analog photography, shooting black-and-white film, color negatives, and color slides. There was always a delay between making an image and seeing the final result. I also hated having to bracket exposures, never knowing if I had actually captured the image I wanted until the film came back. With the iPhone, that uncertainty disappeared. I can make a photograph, see it immediately, experiment with it, and follow an idea while it is still unfolding.

The phone gradually became more than a camera for me. It became a creative workspace. I began asking not only, “What do I see?” but also, “What else can this become?” That shift led to Lunar Sanctuaries, created through double exposures on the iPhone; Lunar Fields, which evolved from photographs I had made along the Los Angeles River and later transformed digitally; and most recently, City in the Clouds, which began with an unexpected tonal inversion on my phone.
 
The technology did not create the ideas, but it gave me the freedom to follow them in ways I could not have anticipated. The tools have changed dramatically over fifty years, but the foundation of my work has remained the same: observation and curiosity. 
 
Carole Glauber: Thank you, Laurie, for sharing so much about you and your photography.

Laurie Freitag: My pleasure Carole!

Click here to see Carole Glauber's work:https://carole-glauber.squarespace.com/

Click here to see Laurie Freitag's new color work: https://lauriefreitag.com/city-in-the-clouds-color-inversion-