Michael Freeman (born 1945[1]) is a British author, photographer and journalist.
In 1978, Athens, the first book giving him title-credit as a photographer, was published in a Time-Life series called The World’s Great Cities. This was followed by two other books, "Guardians of the North-West Frontier: The Pathans" in 1982 and "Wayfarers of the Thai Forest: The Akha" in 1982, both in the subsequent Time-Life series "Peoples of the Wild". Freeman has had a long working relationship with the Smithsonian magazine, and has photographed 40 stories between 1978 and 2008.[2] One of his main specialisations has been Asian culture, architecture and archaeology, and he has photographed and written many books on these, including five on Angkor. The first of these, "Angkor: The Hidden Glories" was used in filming the 1992 non-verbal film Baraka, and Freeman is one of the eight cast in the accompanying 2008 documentary "Baraka: A Closer Look".[3]
He has written more than 40 books on the subject of photography, in particular its practice, and for two of these ("Light" and "Image", both published by Collins, now HarperCollins) he was awarded the Prix Louis Philippe Clerc in 1990 from the Musée Français de la Photographie in Bièvres, France.[4] He has written and illustrated the photography course materials for the Open College of the Arts, an independent British distance learning college.[5] Freeman is also a teacher in online learning with Learning with Experts.